By Suzanna Kerridge, 22 January 2002 09:50
NEWS IBM and VeriSign will today announce a deal to provide organisations with security services for their ebusiness. The E1.1bn (£700m) agreement will see the two companies combine technology and services to target the top 5,000 global organisations. Based over three years, the joint sales, marketing and technology agreement offers IBM the opportunity to break into the security market for large corporates. Elizabeth Primrose-Smith, vice president of global security solutions at IBM, said the deal will allow the company to take a large chunk of the developing market for out-sourced computing as online security services could be managed from an IBM data centre instead of relying on internal systems. In addition to providing integration skills, IBM will provide the computer systems for the data centres designed to support the security services. For its part, VeriSign has agreed to provide all the digital authentication technology. It will also benefit from IBM's extensive customer base. However, the deal calls into questions VeriSign's commitment to its Sun Microsystems partnership. As part of the alliance with IBM, VeriSign has agreed in a pre-nuptial to only run the services on IBM and not Sun server systems. Only last year the company closed deals with Sun and Microsoft's Liberty Alliance Web services initiative as part of its plan to become the de facto internet security stand
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