What is the current positioning of VeriSign as a company?
We were a young company ten years back and we still view ourselves as a young company, but we had to reshape ourself. We are going to be the same company. The idea is to bring all our businesses to the market. There are various degrees of change in some of our businesses. We are the only company that has root-level access at the Internet and the experience that was gained in dot com and dot net side of our business is really our heritage as an Internet company.

VeriSign is largely perceived as a company providing security solutions for e-commerce companies. What is your take on that?
We have become hostage to the checkmark branding, but we are more than that. There is no better company than VeriSign in the digital infrastructure space and which has been consistently delivering at the core infrastructure level as an Internet company. The dimension of security that we are so well-known for is a combination of both the digital infrastructure security or our SSL business as well as some of the services that have put feet on the street whether that is consumer authentication or enterprise class managed security services. The most common branding impression that people get is the check mark at the bottom of the e-commerce web page. This is rendered several million times throughout the day to a large population. The things that are less visible about VeriSign are some of the services that we offer and are built around that Internet infrastructure.

John Donovan executive vice president, Global Sales and Services, VeriSign

Going forward, what is your future strategy in terms of offerings?
Historically, we had units that optimized themselves, which was okay for the early stage of growth, but now we are maturing as a company and are trying to evolve our strategy so that we can bring in all our dimensions into major geographies that have an underpinning of high digital infrastructure usage and an explosive growth rate. We have to be selective and focused the way we approach that market. Asia Pacific should be greater than 20% of our overall business. And in order to attain that rapidly, we need to grow at that rate in the next 18-36 months.

Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in

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