With Federal Express Corp seemingly being one of the contracts every technology companies most want to get, Richardson, Texas- based Entrust Technologies will be feeling pretty pleased with itself. FedEx has signed with the spin-out of Northern Telecom Ltd to standardize on its Entrust PKI (public key infrastructure) key management products and certification authority services. In addition, Entrust will announce today the commercial availability of its secure version of Netscape Communications Corp’s Communicator 4.04 and components for Netscape Enterprise Server 3.0. Entrust was formerly Nortel’s Secure Networks group and was spun out in January last year (CI No 3,071). It is still majority owned by the Canadian company, with 27% held by venture capitalists plus a small employee-owned stake. It provides the keys, manages them, verifies them and supports 11 different encryption algorithms, including RSA, DES, Triple-DES and Diffie- Hellman, among others. FedEx will use the Entrust technologies in a web-based human resources system, electronic document interchange, internet-based customer applications and enhanced security for its email and remote access systems. The secure version of Communicator and a Netscape server was produced jointly by Entrust and Netscape. It is aimed more at the intranet and extranet market as it requires both ends to have the dual-key Entrust PKI technology in order to use the Trusted SSL, Trusted S/MIME, Trusted Object Signing for Java applets and Trusted Java form signing for HTML forms. Entrust-Ready Netscape Communicator costs $15 and Entrust components for Netscape Enterprise Server 3.0 goes for $1,000.
