HID Global Brand Guidelines: A 1991 Hughes Spin-Off, Owned by ASSA ABLOY Since 2000

A radio-frequency idea inside an aerospace company.

HID Global began inside an aerospace company. In 1991 Hughes Aircraft Company set up Hughes Identification Devices, a subsidiary built around radio-frequency identification, the technology that lets a card be read without touching the reader. English Wikipedia says the underlying 125-kilohertz and 400-kilohertz proximity technology had been pioneered by Destron/IDI in Boulder, Colorado, mainly for animal identification and access control, and that Hughes, already a supplier of microchips to that company, took exclusive rights for the access-control and industrial markets. The new business had offices in California and Scotland; the Scottish office closed in 1994 and the European trade passed to a UK distributor, ID Plus, which HID bought back in 1999, Wikipedia says.

The company soon left Hughes. In 1995, according to a press release issued by ASSA ABLOY in November 2000, HID went through a management buy-out backed by Citicorp Venture Capital and led by former IBM and Hughes executives. English Wikipedia describes the same year differently: Hughes managers, with Citibank’s venture arm, combined several Hughes groups with HID to form Palomar Technologies, and HID became HID Corporation. Both accounts agree that from then on the business concentrated on radio-frequency identification for physical access control, and in 1996 it bought Sensor Engineering, which added Wiegand products, Wikipedia says.

On 6 November 2000 the Swedish group ASSA ABLOY announced that it would buy HID. Its release described a company with headquarters in Irvine, California, research and development in Denver, Colorado, production in North Haven, Connecticut, and about 350 employees. HID has belonged to ASSA ABLOY ever since.

Readers, cards and the systems that issue them.

Under ASSA ABLOY the business grew by acquisition. Wikipedia lists Motorola’s Indala radio-frequency access-control business in 2001 and the card-issuance maker Fargo Electronics in 2006, which added card-issuance technology, Wikipedia says. On 31 March 2006 ASSA ABLOY’s Global Technology Division announced the formation of HID Global, a release reprinted by SecurityInfoWatch: the new business combined the HID and Indala brands of readers and cards with Access ID secure cards, Synercard photo-card software, Interlock card manufacturing in Switzerland and BUGA electronic cylinders, and was introduced at the ISC West trade show in Las Vegas that April.

The core of the brand is the card and the reader. HID makes and licenses several generations of credential technology, Wikipedia says: the 125-kilohertz Prox and Indala cards, the 13.56-megahertz iCLASS family, and readers for MIFARE and DESFire cards, with migration readers that bridge the older and newer technologies introduced in 2007. Its products are built into other companies’ systems; Wikipedia names Siemens, Honeywell, Lenel and Tyco among its OEM partners, and says a desktop logon product developed with Dell won a 2009 Smart Card Alliance award.

Later purchases widened the business beyond doors. Wikipedia lists ActivIdentity in 2010, LaserCard in 2011, the biometrics company Lumidigm and the digital-certificate provider IdenTrust in 2014, the controller maker Mercury Security in 2017 and Crossmatch in 2018. In January 2024 HID announced that it had bought ZeroSSL, an Austrian provider of website certificates, folding it into its PKI and IoT business unit.

Research is spread widely. In June 2015 The Times of India reported that HID Global had opened a design centre in Chennai, its first research and development facility in India; Wikipedia adds research centres in places including Cardiff, Prague, Graz and Stockholm.

Access control and video security.

Access control is a quiet kind of design. Most people meet it as a small reader beside an office door, a keypad at a side entrance or a plastic card on a lanyard, and only notice it when the light turns from red to green. The makers in this guide build those readers, the cards and phone credentials that talk to them, the controllers and software behind them, and, increasingly, the cameras and video systems that sit alongside.

Much of the industry’s imagery comes from the building rather than the product. Pictures on company websites and in trade catalogues often show lobbies and turnstiles, staff badges clipped to belts, a phone held up to a door as a key, a guard desk facing a wall of video screens, and rows of server racks where the software runs. Some brands sell mainly through installers and integrators, so their pictures are aimed as much at the person fitting the door as at the person walking through it.

The trade meets at a few large fairs. ISC West in Las Vegas is where HID Global was introduced to the security industry in April 2006, according to the formation announcement reprinted by SecurityInfoWatch; Security Essen, held in the German city of Essen, is another fixture of the calendar. Trade titles such as Security Today and Benchmark report on product launches, new factories and the industry’s own awards.

Ownership in the sector ranges from family firms to divisions of large lock and technology groups, and several brands have changed hands more than once. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Irvine to Austin, and from HID Global to HID.

The company’s own description has shortened over time. Its press releases now call it simply HID; the boilerplate on its January 2024 ZeroSSL announcement says HID is headquartered in Austin, Texas, has more than 4,500 employees, supports more than 100 countries and “is an ASSA ABLOY Group brand.” The web address still carries the longer name, hidglobal.com, and the company’s legal history runs from Hughes Identification Devices through HID Corporation to HID Global.

Where its products are made is documented only in outline. In 2000 ASSA ABLOY placed HID’s production in North Haven, Connecticut. English Wikipedia now says the company has production facilities in Asia and Europe, naming Hong Kong, mainland China and Galway in Ireland, alongside its Austin base; we give that as Wikipedia’s account rather than a current list of factories. The Interlock card plant in Switzerland was part of the 2006 combination, according to the formation release.

HID sits inside a larger group and reaches buildings largely through other businesses. English Wikipedia says it works with equipment makers, system integrators, application developers and channel partners, and that its technology is built into third-party security platforms. ASSA ABLOY’s own 2000 announcement already presented HID as a specialist in identification technology for access control, the role it has kept inside the group for more than two decades, while the range has widened to card issuance, biometrics and digital certificates.

For a design guide, HID shows how a component maker can build a name that lives on other people’s doors and lanyards. Compare its parent, ASSA ABLOY, and the Swiss and German lock group dormakaba. For this guide we use navy, white and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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