Notably, the company will start to resell a co-branded version of VeriSign Inc’s managed public key infrastructure services. MCI senior product manager Bob Blakley said this was driven by demand for PKI created by MCI’s existing managed VPN services.
VeriSign vice president of authentication services Mark Griffiths said that it is the first time any company has resold VeriSign’s PKI services in the North American market. The deal allows the firms to offer improved service level agreements, he said.
Other services will be MCI-branded. MessageLabs will handle email spam and virus scanning. Internet Security Systems will handle vulnerability scanning. MCI will manage firewall and intrusion prevention from NetScreen, Cisco, Check Point and ISS.
Managed security services are becoming increasingly popular, as companies can outsource not only the management but the expertise. MCI will be competing against the likes of IBM, AT&T and ISS, as well as VeriSign itself.
There’s a little bit of overlap there, MCI’s VP of product management Tom Walton said of the relationship with VeriSign. But we have that with a lot of partners, it’s very common in the industry today. Co-opetition has become the norm.
VeriSign has been promoting its MSS business a lot recently. The firm offers managed firewall, VPN and intrusion prevention, among other services. It has racked up customer wins with Sun and Merrill Lynch, among others.
MCI has priced most of the offerings for the SME market, where the company has identified a lot of growth potential. They can of course be bought separately. Most of the new services will become generally available next month.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
