William,
You didn't understand the relationship of Tucows with Entrust...
> 1) The $25 ISP discount applies only to the first year
News for me.. but $25 is not what makes the biggest difference. Once the
customer has obtained a certificate at one place, unless bad service/support
are included, chances are they will renew it at the same place (unless you
sell only certificates).
> 2) Thawte is owned by Verisign, which also owns NSI, and do you trust
> them to keep that pricing at this level when they are competing with
> themselves at $399/yr? Do you want them to have your customers in
> their customer database, thus giving them implicit permission to
> market to them?
This applies to Tucows too, since they get their certificates at Entrust,
which in turn is a Thawte CA authority. I can't say if they all shar customer
lists, though.
> 3) Certs are not levels in the sense you mean. The Entrust CA
> certificate, like the Equifax CA certificate, has been signed by
> Thawte, which enables those CA's to work with older browsers without
> error messages being sent to the users.
To the customers this is not the case. They know Thawte better that the otwo
others and their perception is that they obtain certificates of "3rd level".
> However, Tucows isn't competitive at $99 anyway, I'd recommend the
> business partner program at Equifax as it stands right now.
For Canadian customers this might be OK, even in US. But when explaining this
to overseas customers, they tend to trust Thawte more. Why would they get a
certificate with a reseller that's been in business for 1yr. when Thawte is
the primary CA and has been around much longer ?
I don't question Tucows technical excellence (on the contrary! we are an RSP
and have excellent service), but business wise I have a hard time to justify
jumping board from Thawte to OpensRS certs, for $1 rebate.
Cheers,
Fabian Rodriguez - Associate Dir., Outsourcing and Business development
Toxik Technologies Inc. - www.Toxik.com - (514)528-6945 x1
