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RSA 2007: VeriSign's Internet cloud fortress

During his keynote at the RSA 2007 Conference, VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos announced Project Titan, a three-year investment from the company's capital spend of $150 to $200 million to add capacity to its network infrastructure to keep up with growth of the Internet. "We have to stay ahead of the curve and build capacity to help with RFID and content distribution," Sclavos said.
Written by Dan Farber, Inactive
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During his keynote at the RSA 2007 Conference, VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos announced Project Titan, a three-year investment from the company's capital spend of $150 to $200 million to add capacity to its network infrastructure to keep up with growth of the Internet. "We have to stay ahead of the curve and build capacity to help with RFID and content distribution," Sclavos said.

The Titan project will increase capacity on the company's two root servers and infrastructure for supporting .com and .net domains. In anticipation of a doubling of Internet users, 2 billion cell phone/PDAs, 63 million IPTV users and 34 million VoIP households by 2010, VeriSign is increasing bandwidth from 20 gigabits per second to 200 gigabits per second of aggregate network bandwidth.

In addition, the servers will handle 4 trillion daily queries, up from a maximum of 400 billion today, and the company is developing new management and monitoring capabilities to deal with threats. VeriSign will add 80 regional internet resolution sites around the globe to the 20 it already maintains and increase the number of network operations centers.

With a fortified network infrastructure, VeriSign will be better poised to maintain its position a key through point for domain name lookups and other core Internet services, such as RFID and IP telephony services.

In addition to fortifying its network infrastructure, Sclavos outlined VeriSign's vision for managing security. He chided companies that offer enterprises suites, which he said are build around a group of features. "How can a suite understand the difference between BofA or Google need to have. It's more pragmatic to have a consultant with domain expertise," Sclavos told me.

He is in part promoting the fact that in November 2006 VeriSign acquired InCode Wireless, which added 400 consultants with expertise in wireless technologies to the company's 100 consultants. He expects consulting to account for about $100 million in revenue, up from $30 to $40 million from the previous year, on guidance of $1.5 billion total revenue for the year. More importantly, the consulting can have a major drag effect on selling recurring services that tackle each layer of security, Sclavos said.

He views end-to-end solutions that simplify the user experience for end users, such as the iPod, as the mindset for the next three or four years. If you purchase an end-to-end solution from VeriSign could it be called a suite?

See also Ryan Naraine's post on Titan 

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