Symantec Corp.’s decision to pay $1.28 billion to buy a division of VeriSign Inc. that sells security technology to Web sites highlights how quickly the companies are moving in opposite directions.
Symantec, best known for its antivirus software for personal computers, wants to secure more things.
With the VeriSign deal, announced Wednesday, Symantec will have spent nearly $3 billion in two years acquiring technologies that make it a bigger player in other parts of the security market, such as protecting data on mobile phones and delivering software over the Internet.
Meanwhile, VeriSign, whose brand is ubiquitous on the Web for protecting online transactions, wants to secure fewer things.
It wants to focus instead on a lesser-known but more robust part of its business: managing traffic to Web sites with addresses ending in “.com” and “.net,” and collecting fees for registering those domain names.
VeriSign has been purging divisions for the past three years, after realizing it was spread too thin following a buying binge designed to insulate it from the kinds of problems it had after the dot-com collapse a decade ago.
Prior to Wednesday’s deal with Symantec, VeriSign had sold more than a dozen businesses since 2007 for a total of nearly $1 billion. Some were curious choices for VeriSign to have in the first place, such as a division that did billing services for telecommunications companies and another that sold ring tones and insurance for mobile phones.
What Symantec gets out of the VeriSign deal is one of the Web’s best-known brand names for security.
VeriSign’s logo — a check mark and the tag “VeriSign Secured” — is ubiquitous on Web sites that have bought its security technology. The VeriSign division that Symantec is buying sells “certificates” to Web sites that want protection for their customers’ data. The Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, certificates allow data…