Why Verisign and Identix should form an alliance . . .
There are good reasons on both sides. From Identix's point of view, it is moving to establish supremacy in biometric authentication. However, the company needs to secure its flank in Internet space by ensuring that once it authenticates an individual, he should be able to send a secure encrypted message to someone else. That's Verisign's job, via its digital certificate technology.
From VRSN's point of view, there are two reasons. The first is to improve its authentication capacity. Although every PR release from Verisign purports that it "authenticates" parties as well as safeguards communications, its authentication is at the level of passwords or, at best, tokens. Identix would take VRSN authentication to a much higher level.
The second reason is that VRSN would be able to lower its pricing point on its full service corporate offering. According to a research report at entrust.com (yes, you will need Adobe Acrobat reader for this one), put up by VRSN's rival, Entrust, Entrust is cheaper in full service corporate applications. That's because VRSN uses a help desk while Entrust uses an automated system to replace digital certificates for which the user has forgotten the password. These costs are placed under the category of "enterprise support" (see cost comparison below).
Here are the numbers, as I can figure them out: Help desk password replacement costs about $200 per user per year for 20,000 person networks. The IDT/Compaq product, at $99, is being sold to cut down on those costs because, repeat after me, 'your finger is your password.' In a two-year corporate computer replacement cycle, the IDT/CPQ product costs $99 plus about $50 installation/training instead of $400 per user per two years. I'll use the next generation scanner numbers here, or $50 plus $50 installation, etc. That averages a savings of $150 per user per year over a help desk.
According to Steve's post 13287, in the Australian IDX VPN with Internet Dynamics "Each logon terminal scans the user's fingerprint using a Fingerscan . . . biometric device and registers and locally stores the fingerprint as a digital certificate (X.509). The scanner reads the digitized fingerprint and interprets it as a password. After the logon terminal authenticates the doctor or administrator by fingerprint, the system activates the appropriate certificate." In other words, ideal authentication, no passwords, no lost passwords, and no help desk costs. Simply by making the scanned fingerprint the digital certificate itself.
According to the research report comparing Entrust and VRSN total corporate "enterprise support" costs for a 20,000 user client over five years . . . Entrust costs $42 per user per year and VRSN costs $98 per user per year. (I think help desk password costs in this application must be less than $200 figure above since we are dealing only with a subset of all passwords). If IDX and VRSN team up, you will replace the VRSN $98 figure with the $50 per user per year (next generation) IDT figure. That is a big cost savings, and a big step up in user authentication, as well.
In the research analysis, the overall product costs would favor VRSN, as well. The full Entrust corporate solution is estimated at $79, and the VRSN solution at $124. But with the IDX 'fix,' the VRSN price would drop to $76.
So, if I haven't totally confused you, perhaps you see why VRSN should want to make a deal with IDX at least as much as IDX would want a deal with VRSN. |
