Combined company aims to expand mobile ID, simplify PKI
17 December, 2013
category: Corporate, Financial, Government, NFC, Smart Cards
It’s been a year since the Datacard Group and Entrust Inc. started talking about becoming one company. The two had a lot in common, with government and financial institutions being their largest customers and no overlap or competition when it came to products, says Josh Jabs, vice president of government vertical marketing at Datacard.
The acquisition of Entrust gives Datacard more options when it comes to the ever-growing identity markets. “We looked at a number of different targets and Entrust checked off a number of the boxes,” Jabs says. “Identity has been a growing business and customers were asking us to do more on the certificate side.”
A large part of Entrust’s business is SSL certificates that are used to identify web sites. Most of Entrust’s business in this arena lies in North America but with Datacard’s international reach this portion of the business could be poised for growth, Jabs says.
There’s also the possibility of adding certificate management service to other parts of an enterprise for mobile devices, smart cards and other services, says Dave Rockvam, chief marketing officer at Entrust. “We’re aiming to make it simple to go in and do PKI,” he explains.
Specifically the company wants to focus on the mobile device. Datacard has been working with financial services companies to bring payments to the mobile but with the Entrust acquisition it can also bring identity services to the handset. “As we began digging in with Entrust we discovered that there’s a lot of complimentary technology that will enable us to accelerate the mobile identity side of the business,” says Ray Wizbowski, vice president of financial vertical marketing at Datacard.
The acquisition is going to reshape how people think of Datacard, Wizbowski says. “It’s been viewed as a hardware only company but this makes us a strong software business and it enables us to have a solutions approach from the identity and payments side,” he adds.
Dave Wagner will be president of Entrust and report to Todd Wilkinson who is president and CEO of the newly combined company, which will employ a staff of nearly 2,000. Together the company will enable its customers to issue more than 10 million physical identities each day, handle more than 200 billion transactions per year, and manage billions of identities, including the majority of payment cards and identification solutions in more than 100 countries. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
