Mr. Korzeniewski: We've just gone through an evolution here in the second quarter of 1999 where we've introduced competition into the registration business. We remain the exclusive registry for .com, .org, and .net, but the business has broken out into two pieces now with the exclusive registry on a global basis, as well as being the predominant registrar. And I think the simple story for Network Solutions is how do we take advantage of the second largest subscriber base on the Internet next to AOL? A subscriber base that grew by more than a million new registrants in the second quarter alone! We really have a great business that's at the center of the Internet. We are now looking to both remain the predominant player in our Internet identity business while also leveraging our customer base to drive up revenue and margin per customer.
TWST: And I guess the next question is how do you do that?
Mr. Korzeniewski: One way is that we've introduced a lot of products
over the last 12 months. The products are designed to help a small
business look like a big business on the Internet. The first one we
introduced a year ago January was RegistrationPlus. It enables people to
reserve a domain name even if they don't necessarily need to use it
right away. It's been tremendously successful product and has become our
fastest growing channel. There are many people who want to come in and
establish and/or protect their identity before they are ready to use it.
And it's a 119 product verse our 70 core product. We also rolled out
an international country-code registration services, and a family of dot
com products including the dot com mail personalized e-mail service and
our dot com biz card service. We also rolled out a product called Real
Names from Central which is a company that we have invested in. These
products are all really very close to the domain name space, the
identity space. Now, we recently introduced the dot com directory‹
service. It's very exciting and bit of a game changer for us to go into
the directory space. People who register names with us will get a free
listing in what we think will be the ultimate business find engine on
the Internet. If we look at it, Terry, in its simplest form, we've
always collected a lot of data as a registration company. Now we're
going to take that data, overlay it with data from our partners, Info
USA being the primary partner in that category, and provide a high-
quality data listing for businesses on the Internet. And I don't know
how you search today, but most people who are trying to find a business,
or find out information on a business have a tendency to avoid search
engines because they get 20,000..
Tickers included in this excerpt: NSOL
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.