According to an age-old adage: “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Register.com is giving its corporate customers a couple ounces worth with a
web-based application launched Tuesday tailor-made to reserve, activate and
manage the domain name process.
It’s first customer, Proctor & Gamble, is just a few keystrokes from
protecting its potentially valuable proctorandgamble.ws and
proctorandgamble.il from nefarious cybersquatters.
Now, before you laugh, call America Online, Inc., and ask them how domain
registration works in Brazil. The Internet service provider fought a long,
and ultimately futile, battle with a local provider over rights to the
aol.com.br domain.
If AOL had an application like register.com’s CRP at its disposal, the
whole situation might not have happened.
Shonna Keogan, register.com spokesperson, said the application is a free
value-added service for corporate customers, providing central billing and
easy access.
“Our CRP is very helpful for its users who are looking to set up domain
registration in another country,” Keogan said. “They can look at each
country and find out the particular requirements for registration. Japan,
for example, requires a company to maintain a business presence in the country.
“The application also provides central billing,” Keogan added, “so our
corporate customers get one invoice with all the applicable charges and
re-registration dates, as opposed to an invoice for each separate domain,
which can be confusing.”
The service is provided free to gain more corporate customers to its
fold. Network Solutions, for example, charges its corporate users the
normal registration fee, plus a management fee, for each domain. In P&G’s
case, that would add up to thousands of dollars in management fees alone.
With more than 50,000 employees located worldwide, P&G officials needed a
central database to keep track of the hundreds of domain names it owns.
Now the status of every domain is available for review. The 1,000
authorized users, made up of webmasters, brand managers (like Pringle, Tide
and Oil of Olay), and the in-house legal counsel, have access to the
database of domains.
One “super-user” is responsible for oversight of the application and
pointing the DNS to the correct IP address. This prevents a disgruntled
authorized user from wiping out the entire bank of information. The worst
they could do, Keogan said, is add a bunch of domain names to P&G’s bill.
Richard Forman, register.com president and chief executive officer, said
the CRP gives its corporate customers an easily configurable and scalable
domain registration and management tool.
“We created the CRP with corporate clients like Proctor and Gamble in
mind,” Forman said. “Global companies need to be responsive when it comes
to protecting their brand online, and domain registration is the
cornerstone of those efforts. With CRP, we can deliver state-of-the-art
registration capability tailored to the needs of our corporate clients,
empowering them to be as proactive as possible.”
It’s the first of many, register.com officials hope. With 400 corporate
customers, the registrar is looking to get its existing customer base,
which includes 3M, Dreamworks Studio, Xerox and IBM, into the fold.
