A year after its acquisition of VeriSign, Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) is attempting to make the products simpler to manage for customers and channel partners. 

“The acquisition and integration have gone well,” said Fran Rosch, senior vice-president of authentication products with Symantec. The company has exceeded each of its quarterly targets since the deal was closed in August of last year.

Next month, Symantec will launch a certificate intelligence program for customers or channel partners to use to manage their various secure socket layer (SSL) certificates for enterprise customers. The program, which can be downloaded to the desktop, will be in public beta by mid-September and after a few months of trial, will be widely available.

Currently, channel partners who manage a large number of SSL certificates are using spreadsheets or other very basic ways to keep track of certificates that may have expired or are about to, which creates a management nightmare, according to Rosch.

Some customers have built their own custom management tools, but this new program will be welcomed by partners, he said. There is no set pricing structure for the tool yet. The next phase, next year, will be finding a way to automate the certificate management process.

“It's also still a very competitive market,” Rosch said, which is why VeriSign began offering daily malware scans along with its SSL protection. “If we find any, we pull down the seal,” he added, so that the logo actually has strong meaning for security.

In October, Symantec will also be announcing its rebranding of the popular VeriSign check mark under the Norton brand and after taking a few months for customers to get comfortable, the new checkmark logo will see broad use around April 2012. The combination of brands will be powerful against Symantec competitors as well, the company argues, and extensive consumer testing has shown that Web-users will still see comfort in the redesigned checkmark.

In February, Symantec also announced a partnership with Intel to embed VeriSign identity protection technology into some of the chipmaker's processors. There are also very small security specialists who are finding opportunity with reselling VeriSign technology, he added.

In the past year, Symantec has also helped VeriSign to increase its market share in the strong authentication business, he said. Before the acquisition, there were only about 20 sales people worldwide trying to sell its cloud-based identity authentication solutions. Now, there are thousands on that sales force. Market share is increasing as well after the recent RSA SecurID breach made some enterprises look for new solutions.

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Is it a security must-have or simply a good branding tactic?
Secure socket layer (SSL) encryption has been called by some tech experts as a Web site must-have for businesses of any size, while other quarters contend it's a nice-to-have that in some instances might even be harmful to your site's health.


A recent announcement by security software firm Symantec Corp., of a new SSL certificate management offering for users and channel partners turns the spotlight on this security question once more. SSL pertains to cryptographic protocols that provide communication security over the Internet by encrypting segments of network communications. With technology gained from SSL company VeriSign, which it acquired last year, Symantec will release for public beta in September, products aimed at helping IT administrators, Web hosting firms and tech service providers monitor and maintain SSL certificates.


The release will include free downloadable SSL certificates for users and an onsite appliance which IT administrators can use to maintain and manage SSL certificates used by their companies, said Fran Rosch, vice president of trust services for the enterprise security group of Symantec.

How SSL works


Because a lot of today's communications and transactions occurred on the Web, there is a need to make sure that information being transmitted between Web sites and customers are safe from interception or from being read by unauthorized people.


For users, it is also important to know that the Web site they are transacting with is the authentic site and not a spoofed site. “People's personal information, banking and financial information are being transmitted over the Internet. Consumers want to make sure they are dealing with the right people and not cybercriminals,” said Michael Murphy, vice president and general manager of Symantec Canada.


Secure Socket Layer works through a combination of encryption and decryption routines existing between the hosting computer and browser such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox or Safari to secure communications. It is akin to HTTPS (hypertext transfer protocol secure) and what is called "social authentication”, which was recently deployed by Facebook.


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