Globys spinning out of VeriSign

A little more than two years ago, VeriSign paid $30 million for CallVision, a Seattle company that provided business analytics tools to telecommunications companies. Now, Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign is selling the company back to the original management team, part of a plan to focus on core business activities.

The new company, dubbed Globys, will have headquarters in Seattle, with plans to grow to as many as 75 employees this year. An undisclosed number of staff members will be joining the new entity from VeriSign.

Financial terms were not disclosed, though some heavy-hitting investors are lining up behind Globys. They include the San Francisco investment firm Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, one of the original investors in CallVision, and Trilogy Partnership, the investment firm led by former executives from VoiceStream, Western Wireless and McCaw Cellular.

Derek Edwards, who co-founded CallVision in 1996 and led the Self-care and Analytics unit under VeriSign, has been appointed chief executive of Globys. Edwards, 37, said an opportunity arose to buy the business after new leadership at VeriSign implemented a plan to shed assets.

Last fall, VeriSign announced plans to divest some units in an effort to focus on its domain name licensing, Internet security and identity protection businesses. At the time, Reuters reported that as many as half of VeriSign's 4,500 employees would go to the new companies.

Though Globys will continue to support customers such as T-Mobile, Bell Canada and TelstraClear, Edwards said he sees new opportunities as well.

"We have some new ideas related to analytics in the telecom space and saw this as a perfect opportunity to pull out an existing set of great people, customers, technology," he said.

Globys plans to continue its expansion overseas, with a new office scheduled to open in the United Kingdom later this year. It also recently opened offices in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and in Singapore.

But it also wants to use some of the billing information that it collects on behalf of telecommunications companies in new ways.

"We have access to all of their customers' billing information and purchase behaviors, so we are taking that information and leveraging that in order to provide the telecom companies with better information to help them do optimization, up-sell, cross-sell, mobile advertising and a variety of different things," he said.

As part of the deal, Scott Alderman and Chuck Stonecipher of Trilogy have joined the Globys board.

Edwards said the Trilogy team has "tons of experience" in the telecommunications industry, one of the reasons why they were chosen to help build the new company.