VeriSign

The complimentary advantages offered by urban Geneva and rural Fribourg bring the best of both worlds to VeriSign.

“Splitting the two activities is a good fit for VeriSign.”

Geneva has a high quality of life, an extraordinarily diverse economic base, a well-connected international airport, international expertise and a rich network of R&D and multinationals. What it has a bit less of, thanks to its enviable “green” setting between lake and mountains, is elbow room for installing industrial research or manufacturing plants. But Geneva’s collaboration agreement with the nearby canton of Fribourg has turned that “problem” into an advantage. VeriSign’s Alf Tuvesson explains how the arrangement has worked for his company.

VeriSign’s EMEA headquarters at the top of a glass tower could be in any major city anywhere in the world - except that it is barely five minutes from an international airport. Even more remarkable, the company’s new Customer Care and Data Center is only an hour and a half drive away in the Swiss countryside. The urban-rural combination, says Alf Tuvesson, Vice-President of Finance and Administration, is one of the advantages of a collaboration agreement between the cantons of Geneva and Fribourg

“The installation of our Customer Care and Data Center in Fribourg has worked perfectly for us,” says Mr. Tuvesson. “Splitting the two activities is a good fit for VeriSign. It is more convenient to have our EMEA headquarters in Geneva near the airport and locate activities which do not rely on the airport in Fribourg, where offices and housing are a bit cheaper.”

VeriSign, he says, looked at a number of options before deciding on the Geneva-Fribourg split. “I had previously been involved in setting up two companies in Neuchâtel so that was the first place we looked, as well as at Vaud, some of the other cantons in Switzerland as well as other countries in Europe. But PricewaterhouseCoopers advised us to have a look at Fribourg and the Geneva and Fribourg economic development agencies were fantastic in helping us find locations, people and suppliers.”

Every day, VeriSign monitors over 300 million retail transactions, delivers over 200 million SMS messages and more than one million multimedia messages – among other activities. Switzerland’s secure environment makes the country an attractive choice for the company’s newest data center. “Our data centers duplicate information so even if one goes down, there would be no impact on the overall network,” explains Mr. Tuvesson.

To get the Customer Care center up and running quickly, VeriSign brought in about 25 people from its South Africa office. It now has over 60 people in Fribourg of 20 different nationalities and Mr. Tuvesson expects the “knowledge transfer” to take a year or two. “Fribourg has an excellent engineering school, the University of Applied Sciences, and I am sure we will benefit from these students skills and knowledge,” he says.

VeriSign established its EMEA offices in Geneva in 2003 to consolidate its European-wide operations. “VeriSign grew organically in Europe as well as through acquisition and we continue to consolidate our activities. Almost all of our finance, legal, human resources and tax functions are now here.” The company’s EMEA organization employs 820 people, including 350 developers in India who are supported from Switzerland.

Alf Tuvesson has a particularly astute perception of Geneva as a business base in that he, a Swedish national, has lived here for 20 years, working for several US companies. “A headquarters in Switzerland means that you are seen as neutral, not favoring any one European nation over another. Also, Geneva is very comfortable and safe for expats and extremely well-located. The only problem I have found with the place is that when you bring people over for two years, they don’t want to go home!”

VeriSign: corporate facts

• Founded in 1995
• Operates the system that manages .com and .net
• Handles some 31-billion Web and email connections every day
• Employs 4500, including 1000 specialized technicians, in 75 countries
• More than 400,000 clients
• 2006 revenue: $1.5 billion
• Protects the majority of secure Web sites on Internet, including 93% of Fortune 500 sites
  
  
  
  ‹www.VeriSign.com›