[By Staci D. Kramer] News of a deal has been out for more than a week but VeriSign and Moreover had a few more details to resolve before an official announcement, Today, the executives responsible both for the deal and for making it work explained the decisions to me in a joint call from their respective offices. VeriSign SVP and GM Mark McLaughlin heads up the company’s Naming and Directory division – one of three operating divisions. Jim Pitkow joined Moreover in 2002 as president and CEO; now he’ll report to McLaughlin as VP of Real-Time Publisher Services. If it has anything to do with blogs, pings and the real-time web, Pitkow will be responsible.
The unit will continue Moreover’s business model, offering all of the currently marketed services. Think of weblogs.com as the basic ping service and Moreover contributing the premium layers. No decisions yet on the future of Moreover as a brand.
Here are some excerpts. You can download the full interview — including some comments about valuing Moreover, its history and plans for dealing with splogs — — here. (mp3, 13.5 megs; 22.5 minutes)
On VeriSign’s misson/strategy: When I heard Chairman & CEO Stratton Sclavos give his traditional presentation at the PFF Aspen Summit in August 2004, the real-time web didn’t make an appearance. The first time he mentioned the idea publicly was this past January — now it’s a key component. To understand, says McLaughlin, consider VeriSign’s mission “to provide critical infrastructure services for things that we think are transformational. And those are few and far between in the world. When they come along, we like to jump on them. You could see that with our businesses now (.com, .net, RFID).” As for the real-time strategy, he adds, “We have one strategy – to provide very robust infrastructure services and the intelligence on top of that. (Moreover)’s the intelligent aspect of that.”
Why Moreover?: McLaughlin said the name came up often as he was exploring ways for VeriSign to get involved in RSS, real-time infrastructure and the like. VeriSign already was a Moreover client. VeriSign considered rolling its own but opted for the establihed aggregation and search- indexing company. “Very quickly we came to the realization that Moreover provides the best services and technology here and the reason for that is the richness of what they do from an intelligence standpoint. They have a tremendous amount of resources and they do a fantastic job of categorizing and tagging that content to make it relevant for the users.”
Why VeriSign?: Pitkow says the Moreover had “multiple unsolicited bids.” VeriSign was the most neutral option; the others — we’ve already reported Google came close — were content publishers and advertising companies. Pitkow wanted to continue being able to provide services across the sector along with ramping up the infrastructure to meet a not-too-distant time when hundreds of millions of changes will be registered every day. It’s “important that it be a neutral third party. We’re trying to align here in that we’re not providing consumer applications ourselves. … There’s very companies out there — basically, no one else, who has that kind of neutral thrid-party infrastructure focus as opposed to building applications like the seach engines, the feed readers, etc.”
Expansion: Beyond that — and the $30 million, VeriSign gives Moreover, founded in 1999, the chance to expand. Pitkow: “We have a robust business model. We’re profitable. And with VeriSign’s capabilities, resources, expertise and real-time services, we basically get to add a healthy dose of ‘miracle gro’ to our vision. We get to move faster and do more than what we’re able to do as a stand-alone property.”
VeriSign’s reputation: VeriSign has some reputation issues to overcome within the blogosphere that feeds it real-time web content. McLaughlin saw the references to “evil” and knows a variety of people have expressed concern. He attributes it to jitters over a big company coming in. “The reality, though, is that a company like VeriSign brings to the table the investment resources, the assets, the brand recognition that is required in order to make the infrastructure start to scale up to the demand that’s up there. If people give us some time I imagine they’re going to be pretty happy with the results.”
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