DigiCert Partners to Gain from Vercara Acquisition

DigiCert partners will be afforded new opportunities by the company’s acquisition of Vercara from Golden Gate Capital and GIC, a deal the company announced on Wednesday.

Vercara provides cloud-based services to secure the online experience. Those include managed authoritative domain name system (DNS) and distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) security offerings that protect organizations’ networks and applications.

The acquisition will expand DigiCert’s capabilities to protect organizations of all sizes from the growing number of cyberattacks.

DigiCert isn’t saying how much it's paying for Vercara.

Combining DigiCert, Vercara Makes Sense

Amit Sinha, DigiCert’s CEO, tells us bringing together the two companies’ solutions “makes a lot of sense.” In addition, the acquisition will help DigiCert reach its goal of $1 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

DigiCert's Amit Sinha

“Our primary business has been transport layer security (TLS), secure sockets layer (SSL) and public key infrastructure (PKI)," said Sinha. "We serve 80%-plus of the Fortune 500 organizations. We also operate DNS Made Easy, which is a DNS solution tailored for the midmarket. When we started talking to our customers and also partners, we realized that many of the customers are also customers of Vercara, the company that we are acquiring. So now, let's say you're running a website and what's the first thing you want? You want to register at .com somewhere, so that's a DNS offering. Then you want to secure it to make sure that communication to and from the website is authenticated and encrypted, and you'll come and get a digital certificate. The next step is you want to protect it from DDoS, so you see how the whole solution is getting protected. So that's on the core product offering.”

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In addition, there further synergies between DigiCert and Vercara down the road, Sinha said.

“For example, many large organizations today want automation, they want vendor consolidation,” he said. “When you have multiple different websites and multicloud environments, and you want to name those with DNS, but you also want certificates installed on it, having an integrated solution where you can do domain control verification on the DNS side before issuing the certificate makes things automated and customers want some of those things. So it's bringing together two layers … a common customer base and integration options down the road.”

Vercara serves about 100 billion DNS queries daily, Sinha said.

“That's a lot of data and that also helps our AI effort,” he said. “We can mine that for malicious domains. And we can improve our SSL validation techniques, leveraging some of that data. So all of this made sense for us to acquire this business. It also comes with a significant ARR that is accretive to our business.”

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Revenue-Generating Opportunities for DigiCert Partners

DigiCert partners are excited about more revenue-generating opportunities, Sinha said.

“Let’s start with the basics: cross-sell opportunities,” he said. “DigiCert customers who are looking for a better DNS experience can consider Vercara. Vercara DNS customers who are looking for better integrations with SSL, PKI, can consider DigiCert. Both of these companies have a substantial sales team and we're going to cross-train them. And we'll have the ability not just to cross-sell into each other's customer bases, but also go after net-new [customers] with a combined integrated story that is much more powerful.”

DigiCert is expanding its total addressable market (TAM) with the addition of DNS, DDoS, web application firewall, content delivery network (CDN), bot management and API security, Sinha said.

“These are all part of the Vercara portfolio,” he said. “Their predominant part is authoritative DNS and DDoS, so certainly DigiCert is expanding our TAM significantly,” he said. “Many of the customers we have do overlap, but then there's also a bunch of customers that don't. So there are cross-sell opportunities. Bringing these two together will open up DigiCert to net-new customers that would want an integrated offering.”

DigiCert partners and Vercara partners will get new revenue-generating opportunities with DNS and SSL coming together, and the ability to cross-sell into each other’s customer bases, Sinha said.

“Vercara partners are going to find that hosting providers, registrars and MSSPs are more responsive because now it's not just buying a DNS solution from one vendor and looking for TLS and SSL solutions from somewhere else,” he said. “They can combine that through a consolidated vendor with product synergies as well.”