VeriFone

VeriFone Holdings, Inc.

″The way to pay″
Type	Public (NYSE: PAY)
Founded	Hawaii, USA (1981)
Founder(s)	William "Bill" Melton
Headquarters	San Jose, California, USA
Owner(s)	The Gores Group
Employees	5,000
Website	http://www.verifone.com/

VeriFone is a global provider of technology for electronic payment transactions and value-added services at the point-of-sale. ^[1] VeriFone sells merchant-operated, consumer-facing and self-service payment systems to the financial, retail, hospitality, petroleum, government and healthcare industries.

History

VeriFone was founded by William "Bill" Melton and incorporated in Hawaii in 1981, and named itself after its first product, the name standing for Verification telephone.

Hewlett-Packard acquired VeriFone in a $1.18bn stock-swap deal in April 1997. Four years later VeriFone was sold to Gores Technology Group in May 2001. In 2002 VeriFone was recapitalized by GTCR Golder Rauner, LLC. In 2005, Verifone was listed as public company on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: PAY). ^[2]

In October 2004, Israeli-based Lipman Electroics had acquired United Kingdom-based Dione plc, to go alongside its "NURIT" brand. On November 1, 2006 VeriFone completed its acquisition of Lipman, and added both Dione and NURIT solutions to its portfolio.^[3]

VeriFone today is based in San Jose, California, and has marketing and sales offices across the world.^[4]

Products

VeriFone, Inc. is an international producer and designer of electronic payment solutions.^[5] Its principal product lines have included point-of-sale, merchant-operated, consumer-facing and self-service payment systems for multiple industries, notably financial, retail, hospitality, petroleum, government and healthcare markets.

VeriFone has sold numerous point-of-sale credit card reading products, including the ZON Jr (1984), Tranz 330 and ZON Jr XL(1987), Omni 460 (1991) and Omni 3200 (1999) which were the most successful transaction terminals of their times^{[citation needed]}. The company's most popular current products include the Omni 3700 Family, featuring the Omni 3750 and Omni 3740. In 2004, VeriFone introduced its newest line of products, Vx Solutions (also called VerixV). These include the Vx510 and Vx570, which are countertop terminals offering dial-up or Ethernet access, and the Vx610 and Vx670 which are portable, include batteries, and an integrated wireless communications module. The Vx610 is offered in GPRS, CDMA, and WiFi wireless configurations, and is considered a 'countertop mobile' product. The Vx670 is a true portable or 'handover' version available with GPRS, WiFi, and as of November 2007, Bluetooth-integrated communications modules.^[6] The Vx670, in particular, is a deterrent against the theft of credit information because the customer is not required to relinquish possession of his or her credit card; instead transacting directly with the Vx670 in a 'pay at table' sense. The Vx510 is repackaged as Omni 3730, capitalizing the huge sales of the Omni 3700 series. A derivative of Omni3730 is the Omni 3750LE, which has reduced features, but lower price.

In 2005 VeriFone released its first full color EFTPOS terminal, the MX870. The MX870 is capable of full screen video and is used to build applications by VeriFone customers. The MX870 is the first in the MX800 series of Visual Payment Terminals. All of these terminals run Embedded Linux and use FST FancyPants and the Opera browser for their GUI platform.

In 2009, VeriFone partnered with Hypercom and Ingenico to found the Secure POS Vendor Alliance, a non-profit organization whose goal is to increase awareness of and improve payment industry security. ^[7]

In 2010 VeriFone announced the VX Evolution product line, designed to PCI PED 2.0 specs and providing native support for VeriShield Total Protect, VeriFone's encryption and tokenization solution.^[8] The VX Evolution line is an extension of VeriFone's countertop and PIN pad products and included a number of upgrades from earlier models, such as full color display, ARM 11 processors and a fully programmable PIN pad.

Programming languages

• The ZON and Tranz series are programmed in a proprietary alphabetic scripting language called TCL, or Terminal Control Language. This language has no relationship to the similarly named UNIX-related language tcl. These terminals used variants of the Z80 8-bit processor.
• Older models of the Omni series were based on an operating system called TXO, or Transaction eXpress Options, and the programming language was TXO C. VeriFone had its own IDE for this platform. At machine level, the processors were still Z80 based micro-controllers.
• Newer models of the Omni series (numbers starting from 3300) were developed on Verix operating system (a variant of Linux). The processor used inside is Motorola 68000. Its programming language is also C programming language. Usually Visual C++ is used for software development, but the compilation is done by a cross compiler called Wind River Systems SDS.^{[citation needed]}
• The newest VerixV terminals (with names beginning with Vx) are essentially remakes of the newer Omni series, but with ARM processors instead of Motorola. Verix V is spoken "Verix Vee", not "Verix five". MSVC++ is still used as IDE, but the cross-compiler is RealView Compilation Tool for ARM.

References

External links

• Official VeriFone site