GlobalSign Grows in 2007 Further Strengthening Position in SSL Certificate Market

Netcraft Secure Server Report Highlights a Growth Rate of Over 180%

LEUVEN, Belgium – 17 January, 2008 – GlobalSign (eu.globalsign.com), one of the longest established Certification Authorities (CA) and specialists in SSL security, today announced that the company has achieved an impressive 180% growth rate* in 2007 for its SSL Certificate products - during a year that saw the re-vamp of its brand, the opening of new worldwide offices and the roll out of new products, solutions and systems.  Combined with the backing of its new parent company, GMO Internet Inc, GlobalSign is now well positioned and competing head-on with long-time market leading CA VeriSign.

During 2007, GlobalSign launched several new enterprise and reseller services following extensive customer feedback from the hosting community and enterprise markets. The reseller and enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) type solutions enables customers to quickly, simply and conveniently manage any of GlobalSign’s leading SSL Certificates through an online management interface / API.

Designed specifically for the hosting community, a new reseller system was launched to address the growing need for hosting companies and ISPs to offer featured packed SSL Certificates (with the strongest SGC security provided free of charge) at the best possible pricing and with the highest reseller margins.  2007 saw many resellers join the GlobalSign partner program, highlights of which include a high profile partnership with Verio and the announcement that strategic German aggregator CPS-Datensysteme elected to switch from GeoTrust (a VeriSign company) to GlobalSign.

For the enterprise market, a gap was discovered for a service that could be used by even the most distributed of organizations and could provide digital certificates to conform to stringent security requirements and provide the highest level of trust.  The service works on the principle of pre-vetting, where an enterprise may have an unlimited number of domains pre-vetted and added to its SSL Managed Service account to allow the enterprise to issue its own digital certificates, around the clock and with instant delivery.

“2007 was a busy year for GlobalSign with the re-launch, a greatly expanded management team and a company refocus around speed, innovation, excellent customer service and the development of solid technology partnerships with the likes of Adobe and SafeNet,” said Paul Tourret, managing director GlobalSign.  “In 2008, GlobalSign will look to take the SSL market by storm with the announcements of yet more feature rich products and services that are unrivalled in their ease-of use, reliability, functionality and most importantly, cost effectiveness.”

Throughout 2007, GlobalSign achieved a growth rate of over 180% compared with the incumbent’s growth rates of 16%.  The results underscore a growing customer preference for GlobalSign’s ability to rapidly issue cost effective feature packed digital certificates, as well as the strength and reach of the company’s publicly trusted root certificate.  The results are published in the December 2007 Secure Server Survey from Netcraft Ltd. (www.netcraft.com).

Further information about GlobalSign’s services can be found on its re-branded website at eu.globalsign.com.

*December 2007 Netcraft Secure Server Survey, Netcraft Ltd.

About GlobalSign
Established in 1996 and as a WebTrust accredited public certificate authority, GlobalSign offers publicly trusted SSL, including new Extended Validation SSL Certificates, S/MIME and code signing certificates for use on all Windows platforms including Mobile. The GlobalSign RootSign program allows the widely distributed and highly trusted GlobalSign root CA certificates to provide immediate trust for Microsoft CA and other inhouse CA users, thereby eliminating the costs associated with supporting non-trusted root CA certificates within an enterprise. These core GlobalSign solutions allow its thousands of enterprise customers to conduct secure online transactions and data submission, and provide tamper-proof distributable code as well as being able to bind identities to client certificates for email security and remote two factor authentication, such as SSL VPNs.  The company has a rich history of innovation within the online security market and operates sales and support offices in the US, UK, Japan and Belgium, with services available in a number of European and Asian languages.
 
About GMO Internet Inc.
GMO Internet Inc. (CEO Masatoshi Kumagai) is headquartered in Tokyo and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, First Section (Code: 9449).  Its Internet based business areas include Internet infrastructure and media. Further details can be found at http://www.gmo.jp/en/ and Mr Kumagai’s profile can be found at http://gmo.jp/en/profile/message.html. For further details please contact:

Steve Waite                                       Stephanie Ross
GlobalSign Ltd                                   AxiCom UK
+44 (0) 1622 766766                         +44 (0)20 8392 4095
press@globalsign.com                     stephanie.ross@axicom.com