With thousands of brands and decentralized business operations, The Hearst Corp. was having trouble managing its portfolio of more than 1,500 domain names.

Important domain names had accidentally expired. Speculators had snapped up other names, prompting expensive legal action. Hearst employees who were listed as billing, technical and administrative contacts on domain name registrations had left the company, so renewal notices weren't being received.

To fix the problem, Hearst has outsourced the management of its domain name portfolio to VeriSign. Now VeriSign automatically renews Hearst's domain names using standard contact information and provides a consolidated monthly bill.

Hearst is not alone. More companies are turning to service providers such as VeriSign and Arcemus (purchased by Iron Mountain in May) to manage their growing domain name portfolios.

Meanwhile, companies that want to manage their own domain name portfolios can choose from software packages such as Name Stalker, Watch My Domains Pro and Domain Punch Professional, and beefed-up Web-based reporting and alerting tools from domain name registrars.

"Companies have more and more names to manage. What they were finding was that they had lost control over what they had," says Champ Mitchell, CEO of Network Solutions, a leading domain name registry for U.S. corporations.

That's what happened to Hearst. The New York media conglomerate had about 100 people registering and renewing domain names for its magazines, newspapers, cable networks, television and radio stations.

"We're a very brand-intensive organization," says Peter Rowlinson, CTO of Hearst Business Media. "We were managing our domain names in a semi-autonomous fashion. We have multiple divisions, and we had struggled with setting up policies and procedures and communicating those."

So Hearst's IT Strategy Team set up a committee that included representatives of its various business units and the legal department, and employees who had registered names in the past. The committee conducted a company-wide inventory of domain names and established procedures for domain name registrations and renewals.

Then the committee conducted a cost-benefit analysis and decided to outsource the management of its domain name portfolio. Last fall, Hearst signed a two-year contract with VeriSign for its Digital Brand Management Services.

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