I got inundanted with calls from analysts to potential customers asking my views on the deal, so here it is:
First of all, my hats off to Verisign management team for getting such a good deal! They did change 4 CEOs in the recent few years, and hit a plateau with their revenue.
Verisign, like the grasshopper, jumped once by buying thawte (and they got their market share),
they jumped twice by buying Geotrust (and once again got back their lost market share)…
but 3rd time?
Nope…couldn’t jump…There was no company for sale for the 3rd jump ;), but like I said, hats off to them for surviving this long thru acquisitions and almost no innovation for the last 10 years.
How will all these Verisign customers who bought into the “marketing” of Verisign and bought the “Verisign brand” will feel, now its the Symantec brand they have to switch to? Whats the point of paying those extra $$ for a brand they can’t benefit from? Well, was there a brand worth paying that extra $$ in the first place? Obviously not in my opinion! Just take a look at google trends . That brand had passed its sell by date if you ask me. And Symantec choosing to use their own name rather than acquiring the Verisign name, the so called “Most Trusted Name” is a good indicator of the value that Symantec puts to it.
So how will Symantec benefit from this? The question is will they? Verisign’s main revenue,I believe, is from the enterprise segment. Cross selling to that segment is difficult in this scenerio because:
a) the buyers of certificate services are different departments compared to buying desktop security, storage etc.
b)the no of enterprise who use verisign but not Norton/symantec is fairly limited. Lets be honest, for now Symantec does have a good enterprise presence, so they will be hard pushed to get that cross pollunation they are hoping.
c)Verisign had mentioned in one of their recent financials that they were getting pressure in the enterprise segment, and I am not sure if Symantec can mitigate that pressure or contribute to it with this acquisition. I personally think the latter.
Also, it will be interesting how Symantec will react to issuing Domain Validation(DV) certs to malware websites, hence help create legitimacy to malware providers, while on the other hand selling protection from them! This will put them in a difficult position. To majority of the readers: you will be scratching your head wondering what the hell I just said…..well, I said, Symantec cannot keep a position of end user protection while issuing “Trust Indicator” without any authentication and allowing malware authors to obtain them in order to spread their viruses! Yep…it happens in a big way and Verisign is a big offender as they hold a good majority in the DV market through their Geotrust and Thawte brands. So will Symantec fix that? Or will they aid the malware industry by issuing DV certs?
This leaves Comodo to be the only High Assurance Certification Authority that has not changed hands last 10 years! The most stable Certification Authority, who has, year over year, grown its market share and revenue. The certification authority who has over 400,000 certificates and Comodo trust mark displayed and trusted by tens of millions of Comodo desktop security users.
Thanks
Melih