In case your boss ever questions whether security is big business... Symantec will pay US$1.28 billion to acquire VeriSign's security business. The two companies confirmed the rumored acquisition, saying it would give VeriSign the opportunity to focus on its more-profitable domain name business, while allowing Symantec to broaden its growing portfolio of enterprise security products.

l.

"There is a real need to be able to know who the user is and what they should have access to... but without the central theme of identity we weren't able to provide the total solution," Symantec CEO Enrique Salem said during a conference call to discuss the deal. "IT needs to be able to control the information, and identity matters to be able to provide that solution."

Reports surfaced Tuesday that VeriSign had been shopping around its encryption technology and service business, and naming Symantec as the buyer.

The VeriSign business unit sells SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates -- used to authenticate secure Internet servers -- two-factor authentication tokens, fraud detection and public key infrastructure products for government and the enterprise. But the business has grown slowly of late, hurt by dropping SSL certificate prices, a fact that is reflected in the unit's low purchase price relative to its $371 million in annual revenue.

"If you want to succeed in that market you have to have a lot of services, the platform, large and growing distribution channels -- a lot of things that Symantec has," Mark McLaughlin, VeriSign's president and CEO, said on the conference cal

The link for this article located at Tech World is no longer available.