Verisign marks 10th year Verisign marks 10th year (April 29, 2005)

Company hosts major celebration on Mountain View campus

By Kathy Schrenk

As VeriSign executives celebrate the company's 10th anniversary this month, two engineers are celebrating their own 10th anniversaries at the company.

Norman Eng and Alex Deacon started at Verisign 10 years ago and both are still there - a significant feat in Silicon Valley, where job-hopping, layoffs and retirement mean few employees find themselves at one job for five consecutive years, much less 10.

Eng and Deacon have stuck around for two simple reasons: the work and the people. The small-team atmosphere of the company and the opportunity to work with great people have kept Eng there, he said.

Deacon loves the fact that he works on an important part of Internet. "(Web users) touch VeriSign infrastructure every day," he said. "You don't know it, but if it wasn't working, you would know about it."

Eng and Deacon were recognized by company executives during a festive all-hands meeting -- that resembled a rock concert more than a meeting -- at the company's Mountain View headquarters on April 22. The event also featured speeches by VeriSign's top executives and founders, an overview of the company's history and recent performance and presentations of oversized checks to several local charities. It was broadcast via satellite across the world to other VeriSign locations.

The company was founded by Jim Bidzos, who had worked at RSA Security doing software encryption. He founded VeriSign and hired CEO Stratton Sclavos during the same year Amazon and Yahoo were founded. And 1995 was also the year that Web traffic surpassed FTP as the primary use of the Internet. The company opened in Redwood City, near the Oracle campus, but moved to Mountain View before too long.

Issuing digital certificates for secure web transactions remains VeriSign's core business. The company bought Network Solutions in 2000, making it the sole issuer of Web addresses.

Verisign e-commerce transactions totaled $45 billion in 2005, Sclavos told the crowd of hundreds of employees, which met under a huge tent in the VeriSign parking lot on Middlefield Road.

The company brought in approximately $1.2 billion in revenues in 2004, and employs more than 3,700 workers in 45 offices worldwide.

Also at the meeting, several charities got $10,000 donations from VeriSign: Ronnie Lott's All Stars Helping Kids, Steve Young's Forever Young Foundation, the Boys and Girls Club, the Computer History Museum and the Mountain View-Whisman School District.

Vice Mayor Nick Galiotto accepted the check for the schools and said the city was adopting a proclamation saying that the city is "proud" of VeriSign and wants the company to stay in Mountain View. newitem:E-mail Kathy Schrenk at kschrenk@mv-voice.com

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