In light of Baltimore Technologies' merger with Zergo Holdings of Britain this week, Mr Paddy Holohan, vice-president of business development in the Dublin office said: "We intend to expand pretty rapidly in the US no matter what we do with Zergo or with anyone else." He added that the link-up will "only enhance our US operations significantly" and that they were going to be "enhanced anyway in the new year".
Although the Dublin-based Baltimore sees itself as a leader in information security products outside of the US, it is still fairly unknown here with a technology that is relatively new.
Digital certificates have still a way to go here primarily because commerce on the Internet has still not taken off as quickly as some analysts had predicted. Over here, Baltimore is also faced with stiff competition from two companies with Canadian roots, Entrust Technologies and Xcert International, and a US company GTE Corp. Each of these has US operations.
After the public relations coup it scored last September when President Clinton and the Taoiseach Mr Ahern used its technology when they became the first premiers to put their digital signatures on an international communique, Baltimore opened its Boston office.
Since then the business development manager in the US, Mr Sean Rogers said: "We're aggressively going after this market. We can't break this market from Dublin and we realised that."
The signing by Clinton, he said, "was a great way to launch our US operations and a great boost for us, especially with the Fed." The federal government and state governments are where Baltimore primarily wants to sell its products.
Cryptography, that is the secure encoding of data, is what lies at the base of each of Baltimore's security products. Until now, governments were the main users of encryption since the Internet had not become the vast public domain it now is. The US government continues to be a large buyer of such technology as it continues to make its own operations more efficient and secure.
It has also mandated that US agencies use this technology. For example, the Internal Revenue Service will soon allow tax-payers to pay their taxes online and next year, benefits will be paid to recipients electronically.
"When dealing with the federal government it's a long process," said Mr Rogers. "At last we're on its radar and we're talking to it as a potential buyer."
It realises that to establish itself as an Irish company in the US it needs to form partnerships and alliances with companies that will resell its products or build public key infrastructures into their own products. "Eighty per cent of our business will be through partners," said Mr Rogers.
"I think it is fair to say that Baltimore has been trying to get its act together here but that's difficult for a European company with an Irish base," said Mr Larry Dietz, director of information security at Current Analysis in Sterling, Virginia. Mr Dietz believes that having good technology is not what is at issue here but the need to form distribution and marketing alliances.
"Baltimore needs a marketing partner. I think if it had one in the US that would be a good thing. If it got a large financial organisation behind it that would be the best thing."
Mr Dietz said the company was on the right track but faced an uphill battle. "The digital encryption market is relatively small and there is not a lot of market penetration out there. But a foreign vendor that is not subject to US export restrictions is probably in a better position to penetrate the US market."
Baltimore's flagship product is Unicert, a certification authority system for issuing digital certificates on any network whether that is a corporate intranet, extranet or the Internet.
Baltimore also sells custom-made tool-kits based around the Unicert product to enable applications work with digital certificates. Baltimore had aimed to launch its PKI Plus product in the US in January, said Mr Rogers. The company currently has a number of pilots running and Mr Rogers expects to have the first major customers in the US in production with Unicert and the tool-kits in the first quarter of 1999. Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts estimates that the PKI market will be worth $3-$4 billion (£2£2.7 billion) by 2002 and 80 per cent of that business will be US-based.
Baltimore has four people in its Boston office and one on the West coast in San Mateo, California. In the past two years, the company has grown from six to 80 people worldwide and its sales have increased 80-fold, said Mr Holohan in Dublin.
"The deal will make us 370 people with offices in Ireland, Japan, Britain and the US," he said.
