VERISIGN TARGETS MOBILE SET

While other companies will use booth hucksters to lure attendees to view their demos at Wireless '04 this week, VeriSign will have a captive audience at Cisco CEO John Chambers' keynote address. The short message service interoperability demo during the session will be the launch pad for introducing VeriSign's new strategy of intelligent communications, commerce and content services.

VeriSign will make several announcements this week to demonstrate its progress in solving inter-related issues regarding wireless transactions, roaming and interoperability. VeriSign also will announce the asset acquisition of Unimobile, a provider of mobile messaging solutions and a new customer, MetroPCS, for a new Self-Service Set-up solution it developed with Telespree.

“Our CEO, Stratton Sclavos, was two years ahead with his strategy, and now [that the technology has caught on] he's right on the mark,” said Vernon Irvin, executive vice president of communication services at VeriSign.

VeriSign also will announce interoperability of its Wireless Calling Name Delivery solution with Nortel Networks and a partnership with Tatara Systems that will deliver global roaming capabilities for wireless data.

The roaming solution is an extension of VeriSign's Wireless Data Roaming Service (WDRS) announced last month at 3GSM in France. WDRS manages the relationships between trading partners for authentication, billing and settlement.

Tatara is providing its Wi-Fi delivery platform, which just became available in the fourth quarter of 2003, for integrating wireless WAN and LAN services. “Our system lets VeriSign manage a virtual network footprint for each partner,” said Kevin Jackson, co-founder and vice president of marketing and product management at Tatara.

Jackson said carriers don't want to manage hundreds of roaming partnerships. “And with Wi-Fi, the problem gets bigger because the number of potential roaming partners goes from the hundreds to the thousands,” he said.

The Self-Service Set-up solution sold to MetroPCS will help the operator dynamically modify applications and offerings to its customers by validating identity, doing credit and demographic scoring and determining a customer's optimal service plan. Customers can use the Telespree client to self-activate or reactivate their devices, manage their accounts and choose other services from that device.

Using its billing, security and signaling heritage, VeriSign is selling a network architecture that puts the functions together for carriers moving into an IP-based and converged market. “We haven't declared the PSTN dead yet, but we are moving quickly to IP at last,” Irvin said.