In an e-mail to Sedo customers earlier this morning Sedo announced the Intellectual Property Management Company. This new company is alternatively listed as a subsidiary of United Internet Group and Sedo, and elsewhere as joint venture of Sedo and member of the United Internet Group. According to their website they offer services including registrations, transfers, and renewals for ccTLDs, gTLDs, and IDNs, DNS hosting, SSL certificates, and domain acquisitions through Sedo.

They offer two levels of DNS management, “basic” and “premium.” DNS and SSL certificates may not sound like a logical addition to an IP management service but United Internet has significant DNS and SSL infrastructure associated with their webhosting business. This makes it easy to integrate these services into their domain portfolio management tools. Maintaining SSL certs across multiple registrars can sometimes be difficult, so adding cert management to domain portfolio management is a good idea.

Oddly enough, the Intellectual Property Management Company may not be leveraging United Internet’s SSL cert infrastructure. Looking closer at each company’s cert indicates that Sedo and 1and1 use Thawte certificates while the Intellectual Property Management Company is using Comodo. Other large hosting companies including GoDaddy and Network Solutions have become “self-signing” certificate authorities and United Internet may be considering such a path if the Intellectual Property Management Company sees significant customer demand in this area.