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Technology Stocks : VeriSign (VRSN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jerry Salem who wrote (919)	3/7/2000 1:05:00 PM
From: Norm Demers	Respond to of 1285

Thanks: Things are really starting to look up for RSAS and VRSN. Two big winners long term.

To: Jerry Salem who wrote (919)	3/7/2000 1:06:00 PM
From: Jerry Salem	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1285

Dain Rauscher Wessel calls VeriSign the "best-positioned company on the entire Internet" Demand for VeriSign's Encryption Surges With Increase in Online Transactions By William M. Bulkeley Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal Long the domain of government spies and computer nerds, encryption is going mainstream. The recent push by companies to buy and sell over the Internet is driving unprecedented demand for sophisticated encryption products that encode e-mail, purchase processing and sensitive information on Web sites. And as businesses open their computer networks to customers and suppliers, many are buying more than just encoding software: They are turning over their entire encryption operations to outside companies. The rise of encryption outsourcing has been a big boom for the main encryption vendors, which are offering everything from security consulting to services that tag computers with digital identifiers. VeriSign Inc., the pioneer of the outsourcing model, has seen its stock price more than quadruple in the past six months, and now boasts a stock market valuation of about $29 billion. Two other companies that have recently entered the services fray now have market caps above $5 billion. In 4 p.m. trading Monday on the Nasdaq Stock Market, VeriSign fell $1.0625 to $247.4375. Partly because of the sharp growth in encryption services, the overall market for encryption is expected to grow about 75% this year to about $342 million, according to International Data Corp. John Powers, an analyst with Robertson Stephens, calls encryption a "fundamental ... building block for e-commerce." VeriSign charges a yearly fee to issue encrypted software tags called digital certificates, which let companies communicate securely with employees, customers and suppliers. VeriSign operates a highly secure computer "bunker" at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. When a company signs up for the service, the company dispatches digital certificates to the customers' computers. The certificates, small pieces of software, contain information about the client company or individual to which the computer belongs. In this way, a business that communicates with suppliers over the Internet can access the suppliers' certificates to verify the suppliers' identities before processing an order. Approval From Analysts With sharp growth for business-to-business Internet operations, which mostly involve transactions between two companies, VeriSign has won accolades from analysts for this outsourcing model. Steven Sigmond of Dain Rauscher Wessel calls VeriSign the "best-positioned company on the entire Internet," adding that encryption and other "trust-based services underlie all of e-commerce." VeriSign, which charges Web-site operators $895 a year and individuals $14.95 a year for certificates, boasts that 100,000 Web-sites, including virtually all Fortune 500 companies, are using its certificates. The company had sales last year of $84.8 million. Texas Instruments Inc. uses VeriSign technology to let customers order samples of semiconductors, which the company says has cut down on erroneous orders, a big problem in the chip industry. The Internal Revenue Service gave VeriSign a contract to provide digital certificates to IRS employees to experiment with filing taxes without requiring hand-signed paperwork for legal purposes. Amid the stock-market enthusiasm for VeriSign's model, rivals including Entrust Technologies Inc. and Baltimore Technologies PLC are adding encryption outsourcing to their encryption repertoires. Eric Hemmendinger, information security analyst at research firm Aberdeen Group in Boston, says Baltimore and Entrust were slow to recognize the power of VeriSign's outsourcing model, but he thinks they could build substantial