NamesCon Sponsor Spotlight on Key-Systems GmbH

In just two weeks, hundreds of people from around the world will be converging on the Tropicana Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas for NamesCon 2017! Over 1,400 attendees are expected, eclipsing the attendance record set last year. If you haven’t booked your trip yet, conference passes and hotel rooms are still available.

Today’s Sponsor Spotlight interview is with Alexander Siffrin, CEO of Key-Systems GmbH. We are running this series of interviews with representatives of companies that are sponsoring NamesCon.

What is your company’s mandate; what sets you apart?

Key-Systems is an international IT company that currently manages more than 4.2 million domains for more than 100,000 retail/corporate customers and 2,300 resellers worldwide. We provide a varied structure of supply; five different business areas are targeted to the specific needs of our clients. All of our products combine attractive prices with extensive customer service. Key-Systems provides its clients with user-friendly, secure and fast domain, internet, and IT services.

Who benefits from your product or service?

Our clients vary greatly in size, scope, and location. Our five specialized business areas specifically address the needs of different customer groups; regional to international companies (SKYWAY DataCenter), end customers (domaindiscount24 – dd24), traders and resellers (RRPproxy) as well as corporations and trademark holders (KSregistry and BrandShelter). In addition to domain registration and management, we offer many other related services. Among them are the operation of a registry, server housing, root servers, virtual servers, web hosting, and brand monitoring.

What factors have contributed to your company’s growth and success?

Thanks to our early, successful efforts to receive an ICANN accreditation we became a registrar for .com, .net, .org, etc. and launched the retail portal domaindiscount24 (dd24) in the year 2000. Our core business has always been the registration and management of domains but the following years were affected by the continuous growth – in domains to be managed, offered services and target group-oriented business units as well as in employees – and the acquisition of shareholdings in related companies at home and abroad. The continuous effort to optimize and expand our services is the source of our success. After more than eighteen years in the internet and domain industry, Key-Systems has evolved from an academic sideline to a global player with sophisticated technical solutions and extensive market knowledge.

What’s the story behind how your company was founded?

In 1998, during my studies, I founded the Key-Systems GbR located in Friedrichsthal, Germany, which passed into the Key-Systems GmbH and received its accreditation as a domain provider from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 2000. Thanks to the early ICANN accreditation we were able to grow fast in an evolving market. Key-Systems was named one of the fastest growing technology companies in Germany four times in a row in the “Technology Fast 50” contest by Deloitte. We are always working on this, unless we are shooting a video for the Mannequin Challenge (www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh5TQ7rAjfw) 😉

What major milestones has your company accomplished?

The end customer portal domaindiscount24 started in the year 2000, followed by the reseller portal RRPproxy in 2001 and the corporate domain portal BrandShelter in 2009. That year, the US subsidiary, Key-Systems USA, Inc., based in Leesburg, Virginia, with Bonnie Wittenburg as Executive Vice-President was founded. Further, Key-Systems was a founding member of the “dotSaarland e.V.”, an association to support the application for the new top level domain .saarland. In 2010, the company moved the German headquarters from Zweibrücken to St. Ingbert in its own company building. The foundation of the SKYWAY DataCenter GmbH, a 100 percent Key-Systems’ subsidiary, followed in the same year. In 2011 the KeyDrive S.A. was created. Since 2012 Key-Systems’ system for operating TLD registries, KSregistry, is technical back-end provider for the country-code TLDs .dm, .vg and .gd as well as various .BRAND TLDs.

How will your company engage attendees at the upcoming NamesCon?

We are looking forward to meeting many of our partners and showcasing a preview of our new RRPproxy interface. Our domain business engine RRPproxy brings together more than 1,000 domain extensions and a variety of additional services in a high-performance, easy-to-use real-time system. The new RRProxy interface provides a fully customizable dashboard that shows all details of daily domain management, a state-of-the-art two-factor authentication to secure your account and assets and an infinite scrolling domain list and bulk operations to assist with large domain volumes.

We also implemented features specifically designed for domainers and domain investors and our Domain vCard shows all relevant details at a glance.

How has (or will) NamesCon helped your company achieve its goals?

We will network with customers, partners and friends and inform ourselves about the latest developments in the domain industry. NamesCon is a great opportunity to do so every year. We appreciate the great organization, the interesting lectures and, of course, the many exhibitors.

What are your thoughts on the new TLDs

The new TLDs offer a variety of great options. Our goal is to provide the best possible support to our customers by assisting them in choosing their domains and their registration strategy.

We offer our customers the widest selection with a total of over 1,000 TLDs in our portfolio and thus the chance to register new, attractive domains, which are no longer available in existing TLDs. It will be exciting to see if the new TLDs are able to successfully establish themselves on the market in the coming years. We are looking forward to seeing how brand owners are developing their own TLD and support our customers like DVAG, a pioneer in .brand TLD in Germany, in the application and operation of their own TLD with our KSregistry Services. On the other hand, the many new TLDs make it even more important for brand owners to protect themselves from cyber criminals. For such cases, we offer optimal solutions with BrandShelter.

Where can attendees find out more about your company, product or services while at NamesCon?

Please visit www.key-systems.net

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