VeriSign Inc will today announce a series of new and enhanced managed services aimed at enterprises that want to outsource the complexity of their security infrastructure. The company has inked a number of partnerships to help it manage customers' firewalls, VPNs and intrusion detection systems.

The company faces serious pricing challenges in its mass-market domain name and digital certificate business, and evidently sees managed services as a way to increase the revenue from its enterprise services division and decrease its exposure to volatile commodity markets.

"We looked at the Telenisus NOC and implemented these practices and policies at our own Virginia NOC," Bob McCullen, senior director of VeriSign's enterprise and service provider division said. He said the company has also inked a deal with Counterpane Internet Security Inc, to tie their NOCs together.

"We'll share trouble ticket information and customer information," said McCullen. Counterpane, a security monitoring services firm, will provide event correlation and intrusion detection data to VeriSign for inclusion in its managed services package, in what amounts to an OEM deal.

VeriSign has also started offering managed firewall and VPN services, under a relationship with Check Point Software Technologies Ltd, the leading firewall software vendor. From its NOCs, VeriSign will manage Firewall-1/VPN-1 installations at customer premises. McCullen said Cisco Systems Inc firewalls will also be supported.

VeriSign's existing managed services offerings are based largely on its database lookup services. Managed DNS, PKI and SSL services involve the company's infrastructure being used for validating digital certificates and looking up IP addresses from domain names.

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