It was very entertaining to see Verisign's new CEO, Bill Ropert, trying to both court RSA and IBM, comparing his company as a "mid-morning snack" for them, and play hard to get :-)

Verisign is a bit in a dire straits these days, refocusing on the "core Internet" (domain name licensing, Internet security and identity protection) while shedding all its other assets - about 12 divisions including some or perhaps all, of its mobile operations.

During Ropert's comments it was interesting to learn that Verisign currently handles more than 30 billion transactions a day, with a total capacity to do 400 billion transactions, and with a plan to take that to 4 trillion transactions!

"2007 was a pivotal year for our company. We spent an extensive amount of time reviewing our business portfolio. We found we were in some businesses, most which were good businesses but we weren't necessarily the right home for the businesses. We weren't managing them well. They fit better in somebody's else strategy and path. We have simplified the company. We are in the process of selling those businesses, going back to the core internet infrastructure", said Bill Roper, CEO of Verisign.

Verisign's ROI story to Web retailers... buy our seal and improve your sells

"We're selling products that drive their top line. That's a much more easier sale than trying to control expenses on the bottom line... In our security certificate business, when a Web retailer ads the Verisign seal on their site as Overstock.com found out, the number of abandon shopping carts went down 8%... The consumers felt they can trust the vendor".

Did you know that Verisign was the most "attacked" platform on the face of this earth? No? Don't worry, you're not alone!

"On our global platform, we're the most attacked platform on the face of the earth. We get over 2 million security threats a day. We had no downtime for a decade. The reasons for that is we have massive redundancy... We have the ability to spot this things ahead of time and take action".

Verisign is not for sale... yet! Its CEO is working to prop up the stock price first.

"Recognizing that we're just a little mid-morning snack for a company the size of IBM or EMC. Our job is to run the business well... and hopefully the market will recognize that and share value that would make us obscenely expensive and the big guys will go elsewhere. We're really about discipline. We trade on the value of our brand: scale and trust... We rather not be a bite size snack for IBM, or RSA on a good day".