VeriSign's rapid growth was fueled by organic business development and strategic company acquisitions. Through these acquisitions, however, VeriSign often found that integrating disparate IT systems and workforces from each company proved complex and expensive. As such, VeriSign executives decided that they needed a new IT platform to serve as the backbone of the corporate infrastructure, providing a single source of information as well as support the company's high business volume. VeriSign executives selected the Oracle E-Business Suite to help standardize global business processes, gain better control over operations and eliminate costly inefficiencies that resulted from its rapid expansion.

Additionally, VeriSign continually strives to provide integrated solutions to its customers and partners that enable them to develop new revenue streams and mitigate issues related to cost, complexity, and compliance. One of the key requirements for VeriSign to achieve this goal is establishing an integrated infrastructure that streamlines the entire IT operations system from quoting and ordering through billing, fulfillment, and renewal. The Oracle implementation is an important component in making the customers' experience with VeriSign simple and efficient.

"VeriSign runs the intelligent infrastructures that underlie today's complex, global Internet and telecommunications networks. For VeriSign to effectively operate these critical infrastructures, it is imperative that the company demands the highest levels of availability, scale, reliability, and visibility for its internal IT infrastructure," said Brian Lillie, vice president, Corporate Systems, VeriSign. "Therefore, it is not surprising that we have selected Oracle to run our vital business operations, since it provides unified information that allows VeriSign to make real-time, data-rich decisions based on global elements."

Improved Automation Yields Deeper Dividends
Mainstay Partners' assessment -- based on an analysis of VeriSign's process-efficiency improvements and interviews with senior company executives -- projects that the company's Oracle investment will yield more than $47 million in benefits over five years. The anticipated results stem from better business process automation across procurement, order management, cash management and human resources.

With Oracle E-Business Suite in place, the average purchasing manager can now process orders 50 percent faster than before. The average buyer can now handle three times as much volume and invest more time in developing strategic initiatives. Further, the Oracle-based corporate IT infrastructure helped VeriSign save $17 million in operational costs in the first 30 months of going live. These cost savings and operational improvements are expected to continue to grow in the next few years as VeriSign automates additional business processes using Oracle.

VeriSign has also replaced the manual, paper-based, sales-order process with the automated system from Oracle that captures and books sales the same day. The new system helped the company to cut its sales-order error rate more than 80 percent while boosting productivity by 230 percent.

Global Accountability
The new global, customer centric infrastructure prompted VeriSign to reengineer core accounting operations. Using Oracle Financials, the company streamlined invoice operations and can now process nearly 15,000 invoices a day, a volume which previously took more than one week. The new financial system has helped speed the monthly book-closing cycle while reducing headcount. VeriSign cut five days from its end-of-the month reporting, which previously required auditors to travel to several offices to collect and report data on site. Oracle Financials has also helped reduce the company's days-sales-outstanding by more than 50 percent.

VeriSign also deployed Oracle Self-Service HR to its employees, eliminating much of the paper-based transactions and processing. The improved human resource operations are expected to save the company $1 million over five years.

"The ROI figures coming out of VeriSign are remarkable," said Timothy Guyre, Managing Director at Mainstay Partners. "VeriSign is an excellent example of the operational and financial rewards that can be achieved by consolidating on a single, unified platform. We anticipate seeing similar ROI results in the marketplace as more companies look to do more with less and consolidate technology vendors."

Standardizing on Oracle has eliminated the expensive maintenance required to support VeriSign's legacy IT infrastructure comprised of customized applications, thereby saving the company more than $500,000. The new platform also allows for easier software upgrades and ongoing support.

To view the comprehensive VeriSign ROI study by Mainstay Partners, please visit http://www.oracle.com/customers/studies/roi/verisign.pdf.

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