Singapore Post pulls plug on digital certificate venture

Singapore Post and its joint venture partner Cisco Computer Security have put th year-old ID.Safe Pte digital certificate operation to sleep.

Apparently, the ambitious venture, whose goal was to certify, verify and authent electronic transactions, has proven to be a commercial failure.

ID.Safe was set up as a Certificate Authority (CA) to provide digital certificat containing user identification information and keys. The company, the first CA t licensed by local Singapore authorities in April 2001, offered digital certifica individuals and e-IDs for Servers to vouch for businesses' identities. Transacti conducted with ID.Safe digital certificates were supposed to be legally valid un Singapore's Electronic Transaction Act.

"Unfortunately, the company has had to close. It was affected by the economic do a Singapore Post spokeswoman said about the collapsed venture. The post also par attributes ID.Safe's failure to the collapse of the dot.coms.

ID.Safe officially stopped operating after the CA license issued by Infocomm Dev Authority of Singapore expired on Tuesday, April 23.

ID.Safe was set up as a 50-50 joint venture between the Singapore Post and Cisco commercial security organization owned by Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs. start-up's back-end infrastructure was based on Baltimore Technologies' security products.

ID.Safe was created in February 2000 and had grand designs. It was to facilitate commerce transactions between Singapore and the rest of the world.

At its launch, a senior Cisco Computer executive said, "The company could not ha chosen a better time to launch into this business." Evidently he couldn't have b wrong about the timing. A few weeks later, the dot.com bubble started to burst.

Ignoring the writing on the wall about the weak demand for PKI products, ID.Safe disclosed plans earlier this year to set up a wireless PKI to offer mobile digit for M-commerce transactions. It's not clear if plans to implement a pilot projec mobile certificates ever moved beyond the press release stage.

A "slow take-up rate of digital certificates in the commercial sector and a gene major developments in Public Key Infrastructure in Singapore have resulted in a grimmer-than-expected demand for digital certificates locally," ID.Safe general Lim Yong Gang said. "Consequently, our shareholders, Cisco and Singapore Post, h made a joint business decision to discontinue our operations."

Singapore Post wouldn't discuss ID.Safe's financial performance or its customer referred all questions to Cisco Security.

A Cisco Security representative also dodged the bullet and just called ID.Safe's "business decision." She said its staff has been redeployed to Cisco Computer Se Recovery Services Pte Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Cisco Group, to do P professional services.

Evidence from other PKI-based service providers in Southeast Asia suggests that market's response to ID.Safe must have been pretty bad.

A few months back, officials at the Malaysia Post complained that the market for DigiCert venture was poor and its revenue stream insignificant. Malaysia Post sa market did not understand the need for electronic security and digital certifica are also apparently not enough applications that take advantage of the PKI widge ID.Safe's experience would appear to have been similar to DigiCert's.

ID.Safe says it's currently assisting its customers to move to another IDA-appro provider.

Singapore Post appears to have made little headway with some of its other e-proj well. Nearly a year after its announcement, the post has yet to launch its heral e-mail and electronic document delivery services. The secure e-mail service was on password encryption and the public key infrastructure, presumably on the ID.S platform.

With ID.Safe's death, it's not clear whether the secure e-mail service will see the day. A post spokeswoman said she was not sure about the project's status. Pl offer an Internet postage service also seems to have been dumped after a pilot.

Singapore Post currently offers e-bill services under the vPost brand.