Somewhere down the road, the convergence of various technologies, including but not limited to voice, data, and interactive TV, will converge around TCP/IP When they do I'm rather confident that VeriSign will touch you in more ways than one. The company appears to have an acute vision of the future that all of us can learn from as we chart our own courses. Despite losing $4.8B in its last quarter (mostly due to a goodwill write-off), the company is positioned to be a preeminent if not indispensable link in the global communications and e-commerce chains.

But if VeriSign gets there, it won't be by accident. Judging by what I heard during my interview with VeriSign's principal scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker, the company has a realistic idea of how convergence will affect the world's digital infrastructure, and how to position itself to serve those who will rely on it (all of us) with a leading if not unique blend of technologies and services.

The way Hallam-Baker tells VeriSign's story, it's a contemporary version of the birth of automated circuit switching. Hallam-Baker recounts Almon B. Strowger' unusual story. Strowger was an undertaker who fell prey to a competitor that bribed a Lily Tomlin-like switchboard operator to reroute the calls intended for Strowger's company to the competitor. Strowger learned the hard way that the manually switched infrastructure couldn't be trusted. So he invented an automatic switch that removed untrustworthy (and error-prone) humans from the equation.

In a world where physical circuits are giving way to digital networks that rely on the successful routing of packets instead of radio signals, that same sort of trust lives at the heart of VeriSign's mission. In view of the convergence of voice and television with today's packet-based data networks, people are willing to pay for the same kind of trust that Strowger's switch offered. For example, when users type www.amazon.com into a browser, they are taken to Amazon and not somewhere else. Similarly, trust is implicit when users tune into a news broadcast and get the news broadcast they wanted, or when they place telephone calls to Federal Express and don't get UPS instead.

This sort of trust has even worked its way into downloadable software. Most of us have already come across VeriSign's Authenticode, a technology that reassures us that the plug-in we just downloaded into our browser has not been tampered with since the original developer compiled it.

Who pays for this kind of trust? In the case of the telephone network, nobody would have paid for it when it was run by one company. (Well, maybe the cost of that trust was somewhere in our phone bill. It just wasn't labeled trust.) Since every phone line and every switch was under AT&T's control, the company could virtually guarantee the proper routing of phone calls. But now that there are literally hundreds of network operators handing out millions of phone numbers and IP addresses, it's impossible for AT&T or any other network provider to guarantee what happens to a connection once it leaves its network and heads across another. AT&T and the rest of the network providers still have to assure their customers that the network as a whole can be trusted. AT&T's 1-800 customers would be very disappointed to learn that users of Verizon's network couldn't reach them because of a problem on Verizon's end, for example.

This situation creates the perfect opportunity for intermediaries to get between all the network providers (the same way the automatic switch got between the source and destination of every phone call) by running a single, trusted database of all the sources and destinations. This way, the various providers only have to update the databases run by those intermediaries, and they can outsource the provision of trusted "switching" to them.

Only one database will exist
VeriSign is such an intermediary. VeriSign also knows that while there may be separate databases for each of the infrastructures (phone, television, Internet, etc.) today, a time will come when everything converges around IP, and only one database will exist. But to become that indispensable provider of trust, VeriSign must not only give itself a head start on today's separate databases; it must plot a course that encourages their convergence with other databases where trust will be essential.

So, how far along is VeriSign? Pretty far, if you ask me. For example, through its acquisition of Network Solutions, it claims to run the largest database of Internet domains (DNS). Through its acquisition of Illuminet, VeriSign is now a trusted provider of the databases and technologies that handle the switching of phone calls in a digital world. VeriSign is also in the business of guaranteeing the integrity of financial transactions that are moved electronically between buyers and sellers across multiple networks.

While these are good examples of how the company is positioning itself for convergence, the businesses that VeriSign is not yet in, but that would seem to be a natural fit, are far more interesting. I probed Hallam-Baker with a few ideas, and while he refused to divulge VeriSign's plans, it's safe to say that the company will have its hand in most of the cookie jars I mentioned.

At the top of my list are Web services. Once Web services become a reality, an intermediary will need to step in to guarantee the integrity of the machine-to-machine communications among all parties involved. This will require expertise in areas that VeriSign is already involved in, such as PKI management and electronic payments. Companies that run services will also require guarantees that previously authenticated Web service code hasn't been hacked or tampered with--(an extension of VeriSign's Authenticode business. Perhaps the biggest opportunity will be in running a UDDI directory. Hallam-Baker refused to speculate on whether VeriSign would run such a directory, or whether it would become a broker of trust between buyers and sellers (especially those using incompatible security protocols). But it's literally impossible for the company not to get into those lines of business. VeriSign has been involved in the development of the UDDI specification since day one, and it is one of only three companies (IBM and Microsoft are the others) living at the heart of the security specification for Web services--WS-Security. In terms of bridging incompatible security protocols, Hallam-Baker admits that the company is already in that line of work for its payment business and agrees that transferring that expertise into the field of Web services makes sense.

Hallam-Baker also considers providing additional business information that you typically get from organizations like Standard & Poor's or TRW as an extension of the trust area. Indeed, this is one kind of service where all of the databases that Versign now manages would intersect. Without hesitation, Hallam-Baker told me that this type of information is a natural extension of a UDDI directory. If that admission isn't a dead give away that VeriSign wants to be in that business, I don't know what is.

About the only question that remains to be answered is how long will it take for all of these technologies to really converge? Hard to say. By themselves, some of the business areas that VeriSign is in, or will be in, have yet to mature. By Hallam-Baker's own admission, it may be another 18 months before the WS-Security standards are mature enough for developers to rapidly develop trusted, secure Web services.

But when that convergence finally becomes a reality, I have little doubt that VeriSign, or any company that acquires it (as long as that company is a somewhat neutral player), will be well positioned.