BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : OCTOBER 23, 2000 ISSUE
BUSINESS WEEK E.BIZ -- UPSTARTS VeriSign's Portfolio of Businesses WEB SITE ENCRYPTION SERVICES Market share: It has 75% of a $100 million market that's growing at 100% a year. Competitors: Baltimore Technologies (BALT), Entrust Technologies (ENTU), IBM (IBM). The skinny: VeriSign (VRSN) dominates this market, which has high barriers to entry. It's expensive to set up a network with encryption services that keep sales transactions private on thousands of Web sites. WEB SITE ENCRYPTION SOFTWARE Market share: The company has just 2% of a $180 million market that is growing at 50% a year. Competitors: Baltimore Technologies, Entrust Technologies, IBM, Microsoft. The skinny: Baltimore Technologies (BALT) and Entrust (ENTU) are entrenched, and Microsoft (MSFT) includes free encryption technology in Windows 2000. VeriSign isn't pushing hard on this business but wants to be able to offer customers the software if they want it. INTERNET PAYMENT PROCESSING Market share: VeriSign has 20% of a $75 million market that's growing at 100%. Competitors: CyberCash (CYCH), CyberSource (CYBS), Authorize.Net. The skinny: Thanks to its purchase of Signio, VeriSign is a key player. It's aggressively moving into the B2B payment processing business through partnerships with such software companies as Ariba (ARBA) and Commerce One (CMRC). WEB SITE REGISTRATION Market share: 41% of a $210 million market that's growing at 100% a year. Competitors: Registry.com, GreatDomains.com, Namezero.com, and at least 50 others. The skinny: This summer it acquired Network Solutions, which once had a monopoly on registering all Web sites. VeriSign wants to reduce its registration presence so it can extend an exclusive government contract for managing the master Web site database. WEB SITE DATABASE Market share: 100% of a $36 million market that's growing at 100% a year. Competitors: None. It has an exclusive government contract for the next three years. The skinny: What a deal! VeriSign receives $6 for every .com, .org, and .net name registered by other companies. To renew that contract in 2003, the government wants VeriSign's registration business to drop below 25%. DATA: CHASE H&Q; GARTNER GROUP; IDC _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS EBIZ Contents for issue dated Oct. 23, 2000 The Web's Virtual Vault: VeriSign CHART: VeriSign: A Net Giant Emerges TABLE: Gross Margins for Web Software Leaders TABLE: Analyst Ratings on VeriSign TABLE: VeriSign's Portfolio of Businesses ONLINE EXTRA: Q&A with VeriSign's Stratton Sclavos INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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