VeriSign announced plans today to further meld its Internet and telecommunications solutions by teaming with consulting and system integration firm BearingPoint to develop an integrated billing and payment platform for the communications industry.

VeriSign will build the new solution based on BearingPoint’s InfoNova convergent rating and billing platform and plans to have it commercially available by the end of this year. The companies also will coordinate on sales, support and implementation.

VeriSign expects to use the billing and payment platform to expand globally and reach into new markets such as voice-over-IP, broadband, cable and wireless content and data.

"We believe we are setting a new precedent in the billing and payment space," said Vernon Irvin, executive vice president of VeriSign’s Communications Services. "We’re going from a company that owns and operates one of the largest online payments businesses and service bureaus businesses for Tier 2 and Tier III [providers] to putting out a world class billing platform."

Irvin, who came to VeriSign about seven months ago from rival AMS, added that while the companies are co-developing the new platform, the resulting product will be VeriSign’s. The companies, who now have a joint marketing agreement, have been discussing the strategy with customers over the last 60 days and hope to transition customers over the next eight months to 1.5 years.

BearingPoint’s customers are primarily outside of North America. VeriSign’s base of customers is primarily in the Americas. "This is a great opportunity to get into new geographies," Irvin said.

The companies will begin joint marketing of existing products in North America today and expect to begin selling the integrated pre-pay, post-paid and payment solution globally by the end of the year.

The platform will based on IBM, Oracle, Solaris and UNIX platforms. It will support multiple technologies such as CDMA, TDMA, SMS, MMS and BREW and have provisioning and point-of-sale capabilities as well as a carrier-branded user interfaces.

VeriSign also announced today an Open Authentication reference architecture (OATH), which is meant to accelerate the adoption of strong authentication technology across all networks. OATH leverages existing standards and an open reference platform to ensure that secure user and device credentials can be provisioned and verified by a variety of software and hardware solutions. It is the foundation for what Irvin calls "the promise of trusted commerce, communications, and content."

Device manufacturers, software vendors and service providers who develop OATH-compliant products will be able to create and offer interoperable solutions for network, application and content protection. The OATH architecture calls for a new, more versatile generation of physical tokens that can combine three authentication methods, including OTP, PKI-based authentication and SIM-based authentication.

"VeriSign’s core purpose is to create and operate transformational infrastructures that are indispensable to society," Irvin said.