VeriSign CEO Sclavos talks telecom

Here's a little-known fact about $1 billion-plus company VeriSign: Its telecom business actually generates about as much revenue as its security business and much more than its very visible domain registration business. Chairman and CEO Stratton Sclavos, who is scheduled to speak at carrier industry show Supercomm in Atlanta next week, talked telecom recently with Network World News Editor Bob Brown. What follows is an edited transcript of Sclavos' thoughts on a range of topics.

VeriSign's telecom business:

It will become a bigger and bigger piece of our story in the next 12 to 18 months, as we start to bring our IP and voice assets together. I would think [telecom] would be at least equivalent with the security and directory side of our business, and today we have very little international presence in telecom and that's a big thrust for us in next couple of years. It's likely telecom could be upwards of 40% or 45 % of our business in the next two years.

We own some critical infrastructure that helps manage the IP addressing for .com and .net, helps secure over 400,000 Web sites, and helps process transactions for about 90,000 merchants. We handle close to 8 billion interactions every day around the IP addressing world.

Last year, we stepped into the telecom world to do the same thing [via the acquisition route], to create a utility that is there so that we can route phone calls, provide security and authentication services, and really be kind of an interoperability hub between carriers, between wireless and wireline services. Today, we probably have something to the tune of $500 million to $600 million worth of deployed infrastructure around the globe, including the largest SS7 [Signaling System 7] network in North America not owned by an RBOC. What we're doing now is the research and development work and buildout of the next generation of services that combine the IP databases and the voice databases that create new services that might make sense in a converging world where voice heads over IP lines.

 Impact on enterprise network customers:

Today, it's true that we're selling to telecom companies but it will probably become a focus of ours to sell directly to enterprises by the end of this year. What we might sell to companies that have IP PBXes would be services that allow [those devices] to check our directories much the way servers check our Internet directories today to find out where to route Web site requests. We would have directories that would tell you whether a phone number is reachable over an IP path or not. If it is, we would help route that call over the Internet and if it is not, we would actually route that call over the PSTN via our SS7 network.

Atlas project:

That is the key redesign of DNS that we began two-and-a-half years ago when we bought Network Solutions. All our telecom and IP databases will run on it. It has [been] very quietly rolled out into all 13 of our DNS centers globally and by the end of June it will be fully turned on. That takes us to the ability to scale to about 100 billion lookups for routing per day from the 8 billion we do currently. That's a fundamental leap in the infrastructure's capacity and a fundamental breakthrough in cost/capacity in that we can do it in about a tenth of the cost per query we do on the current system.  When we began to build Atlas it dawned on us we could take the system and instead of making it DNS-centric, we could make it handle SS7, and a variety of other protocols that makes it multipurpose instead of single-function system like today's DNS.