The Internet technology and services company VeriSign Inc. is streamlining its businesses to focus on online security, including a suite of security tools widely used in the financial services industry.
As part of a reorganization plan announced Wednesday, the Mountain View, Calif., company said it plans to shed its communications, billing, and commerce divisions in order to free up resources for its Internet security operations and VeriSign Identity Protection offerings.
VIP has been promoted to financial institutions as an easy-to-deploy anti-fraud tool that supports multifactor authentication as well as behind-the-scenes fraud detection.
The fraud detection element examines server logs for signs of fraudulent behavior; companies do not need to modify the software coding on their existing systems to run VIP. The software can also spot suspect behavior in such data as end users' hardware, network configurations and Internet Protocol address, and how they gain access to a client's site.
The multifactor authentication element supports hardware and software tokens, which VeriSign also supplies to many major financial services companies, including Bank of America Corp. and eBay Inc.'s PayPal Inc.
"The combination of focus and disciplined execution will provide the foundation we need to generate improved shareholder returns," Bill Roper, VeriSign's chief executive, said in a press release. (VeriSign did not return calls Wednesday.)
Avivah Litan, a vice president and research director at the market research company Gartner Inc., said that VeriSign "is actually going back to their roots" in security. "By reorganizing this way, they'll be able to capitalize on bank interest."
That the security business survives the reorganization is strongly indicative of VeriSign's plans, she said. "VeriSign had lots of different businesses that they're shedding, and this is one of three that they're focusing on," she said.
VeriSign said it will also keep its domain-naming business and its Web certificate issuance business.
