Entrust

Entrust Inc. is a $130 million privately owned software company with 350 employees. Originally a spin-off from Nortel's Secure Networks division,^[1] it provides identity management ^[2] security software and services in the areas of public key infrastructure (PKI), multifactor authentication, Secure Socket Layer certificates, fraud detection, digital certificates and mobile authentication.^[3] Headquartered in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, the company’s largest office is in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It also has offices in London, Tokyo, Washington, D.C. and other cities internationally.^[4]

Entrust reports having customers at public and private organizations in 60 countries, with 125 patents either granted or pending in the areas of authentication, physical/logical access, certificates, e-content delivery and citizen identities.^[5]

Previously a publicly traded company, in July 2009 Entrust was acquired by Thoma Bravo, a U.S.-based private equity firm, for $124 million.^[6]

In December 2013, Datacard Group announced the acquisition of Entrust Inc.^[7]

Company Leadership

• As part of the acquisition by Datacard Group, Entrust named David Wagner president.^[8]
• Former President and CEO Bill (F. William) Conner spoke several times on global and national cybersecurity and infrastructure issues.
• In February 2012, Conner testified in front of United States House of Representatives committee on Energy and Commerce on the subject of cybersecurity threats facing the US.^[9]
• In June 2011, Conner gave the keynote addresses at the 2011 West Virginia Homeland Security Summit and Expo sponsored by West Virginia senator Jay Rockefeller.^[10]
• In November 2010, Conner was invited to address global security and law enforcement officers at the 79th General Assembly of INTERPOL in Doha, Qatar.^[11]

History

Bill (F. William) Conner, Former President and CEO of Entrust, speaking on global cybersecurity before the INTERPOL 79th General Assembly in Doha, Qatar, November 2010.

An Entrust sponsored Porsche 997 GT3 Cup.

Core to a forward-thinking strategy, Datacard Group finalized the acquisition of Entrust in December 2013 from private equity firm Thoma Bravo. Datacard Group stated that the "acquisition builds on the strengths of each company to enable its customers and partners to deliver better services in a highly connected environments.^[12] Chertoff Capital, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Chertoff Group, and Centerview Partners acted as financial advisors to Entrust.

In September 2008, Entrust participated in the ePassports EAC Conformity & Interoperability Tests in Prague, Czech Republic.^[13] Facilitated by a consortium of the European Commission, Brussels Interoperability Group (BIG) and the European Commission Joint Research Centre, the Prague tests allowed European countries to verify conformance of their second-generation ePassports containing fingerprint biometric data protected by Extended Access Control functions, commonly referred to as EAC. Additional testing included verification of crossover interoperability between EAC inspection systems and ePassports from different countries.

Prior to it becoming a private-equity company Entrust was included on the Russell 3000 Index in July 2008.^[14] In July 2007, Entrust contributed PKI technology to the open-source community through Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the Mozilla Foundation. Specifically, Entrust supplied certificate revocation list distribution points (CRL-DP), Patent 5,699,431, to Sun under a royalty-free license for incorporation of that capability into the Mozilla open-source libraries.^[15]

In July 2006, Entrust acquired Business Signatures Corporation,^[16] a supplier of non-invasive fraud detection solutions, for $50 million (USD). From a GAAP accounting perspective, the total purchase price was approximately $55.0 million, including assumed stock options, transaction expenses and net asset value. Business Signatures was founded in 2001 in Redwood City, California by former executives from Oracle, HP and Cisco. It originally was funded by the Texas Pacific Group, Walden International, Ram Shriram of Google and Dave Roux of Silver Lake Partners. The company had about 40 employees before the acquisition.

Entrust acquired Orion Security Solutions, a supplier of public key infrastructure services, in June 2006.^[17]

In mid-2004, Entrust acquired AmikaNow! Corporation's content scanning, analysis and compliance technology.^[18] The technology is designed to automatically analyze and categorize email message and document content based on the contextual meaning, rather than pre-defined word lists. Policies can be customized to suit the corporate environment and be automatically enforced at the boundary, and are aimed at compliance with privacy and securities laws including HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and various U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations.

In April 2002, Entrust’s PKI technology served as the foundation for the prototype of what is now the United States Federal Bridge Certification Authority (FBCA). The Federal Bridge certificate authority is a fundamental element of the trust infrastructure that provides the basis for intergovernmental and cross-governmental secure communications. Entrust's PKI is interoperable with all major FBCA vendors.

In May 2000 Entrust acquired enCommerce, a provider of authentication and authorization technologies. In 1994, Entrust built and sold the first commercially available PKI.

See also

• Comodo
• DigiCert
• GeoTrust
• neXus
• RSA Security
• Safelayer
• Thawte
• VeriSign
• Ascertia

References

External links

• Official website
• Entrust SSL certificates website