Go Daddy president and COO Warren Adelman in a WHIR TV interview
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In an effort to defend its place among the leaders in the market for Secure Sockets Layer certificates, GeoTrust (www.geotrust.com) slashed its SSL prices in half and launched an aggressive new campaign squarely aimed at attracting SSL customers from online services firm Go Daddy (www.godaddy.com).
According to GeoTrust, the digital certificate division provider that was acquired, along with the rest of the rest of the security portion of VeriSign by IT security firm Symantec (www.symantec.com), its “Who’s Your Daddy Now?” lets Go Daddy customers trade in their Go Daddy SSL certificates for equivalent GeoTrust SSL certificates at no charge.
Warren Adelman, president and chief operating officer at Go Daddy says he’s not worried. He takes the campaign aimed directly at his customers as a good sign.
“I think it’s good for us. It means they’re afraid,” Adelman said in a phone interview. “I take it as flattery. We’re obviously kicking their asses, and because of that they’re trying to frantically win customers. So if that video they have on their site is any indication of their marketing prowess, I don’t think we have very much to be concerned about.”
The battle for the SSL certificate space has been heating up over the past few years, and this trend has been increasing, given Symantec’s acquisition of VeriSign’s security operations earlier this year – which included GeoTrust, acquired by VeriSign in 2006.
According to the Alexa Netcraft Index for September, GeoTrust secured 20.6 percent of unique domains among the 1 million most visited sites. The VeriSign (www.verisign.com) brand followed with 17.9 percent of all unique domains, and Go Daddy was third, with a 15.6 percent share.
Go Daddy, however, has led in overall SSL certificate growth for 22 of the past 24 months, according to Netcraft reports. After entering the SSL certificate market in March 2004, Go Daddy has steadily grown due to “pure organic growth,” meaning that adoption was not created through mergers or acquisitions.
Adelman says Go Daddy got into the SSL business simply to meet the demands of customers.
“Customers were calling us up and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got my website with you; we’ve got this transactional stuff; how do I encrypt my traffic; where do I get a certificate?’ and we were referring them to other companies. So the light bulb went off and we said we should get into this business.”
Noting the similarity of the SSL marketplace to when Go Daddy first entered the domain space (it captured a dominating share of that market in a matter of a few years, largely through marketing and price competition), Adelman says, “We took a look at this marketplace, and we said, hey, this marketplace is overpriced, underserved; it has bad licensing deals; it’s not great for customers; it’s so expensive that it’s a barrier to entry to small businesses, and we want more and more small businesses to secure their sites to make it safer.”
Go Daddy got into the SSL Certificate business in April 2004, with the goal of offering certificates with great prices and support, and integrating them into the Go Daddy portfolio.
In what Adelman says is a reaction to Go Daddy’s pricing, GeoTrust has cut its SSL certificate prices by half, offering, for instance, its QuickSSL Premium domain validated protection starting at $149 per certificate.
“Even if you go over to them, their prices are still higher,” Go Daddy’s EV SSL product, he said, is $99.
Adelman says the rationale behind the “Who’s Your Daddy Now?” campaign has a lot to do with the internal politics. “Symantec bought VeriSign’s SSL business and now the units within that business have to show that they can perform, so they’re pulling out all the stops.”
Competing SSL providers may contend that the technology behind their certificates is better than Go Daddy’s. Adelman said that this is simply not true. “It’s all BS, okay. We all offer the same technology, the same certificates… everybody offers the same certificates.”
He calls the only difference trivial.
“The only difference is that the Symantec guys offer something called Server Gated Cryptography certificates – which many have pointed out is kind of ridiculous – they charge you more for these things so that you can step up to a certain level of encryption for really old browsers. So it’s really kind of silly because you really think that a browser [like] IE4 should step up to higher encryption when the browser itself is riddled with a ton of vulnerabilities, and these people should have upgraded to IE7 a long time ago.”
While Go Daddy’s actions do put pressure on Symantec, Adelman said that the company is, in fact, competing with itself. He paraphrased one of the company’s founder’s sixteen rules: “Pay attention to your customers; pay attention to your competitors; but pay more attention to what you’re doing meaning, we focus on our customers, and what they’re staying to us, and we’re going to continue to do so.”
Adelman says the indication is basically that Go Daddy is putting pressure on the SSL market, and GeoTrust in particular.
“You see that in them lowering their prices,” he says. “You see that in them changing their licensing model to unlimited licensing for servers, which are things that we started out with, so we’ve got the pressure on.”
In November, WHIR editor Liam Eagle posted a video interview with Adelman to WHIR TV.
No related posts.
