AusRegistry

Type:	Privately Held
Industry:	Registry
Founded:	Melbourne, Australia, 2000
Founder(s):	Adrian Kinderis
Headquarters:	Level 8 10 Queens Road Melbourne, VIC 3004
Country:	Australia
Businesses:	ARI Registry Services, International Division
Employees:	11-50
Website:	ausregistry.com.au
Twitter:	@ausregistryint
Key People
Adrian Kinderis, CEO Krista Papac, CSO Andrew Pink, Business Development Consultant Michael Twist, Business Development Consultant Tracey Boak, Business Development Consultant Jack Simpson, Marketing and Communications Manager Axia Harrison, Marketing and Events Coordinator

AusRegistry is the registry operator and wholesale provider for all commercial Australian domains (.au), including .net.au and .com.au, as well as non-commercial Australian domain names, like .edu.au and .gov.au. It was the first commercial Internet registry in Australia.

History

AusRegistry was founded in 2000 and has its headquarters in Melbourne, Australia; it was initially founded under the name RegistrarsAsia Pty Ltd. (now AusRegistry Group Pty Ltd.). AusRegistry Pty Ltd. is a subsidiary of the AusRegistry Group Pty Ltd. which was founded in December, 2001.

AusRegistry secured a four year contract to operate the domain name registry for auDA, the .au ccTLD manager, in 2002. A second four year period was obtained in 2005, with the contract beginning in June of 2006. The .au Registry Licence Agreement that auDA has with AusRegistry was subsequently extended until 2014, which both parties announced in February, 2009.

Given that AusRegistry manages all SLDs in Australia, is involved with the ccTLD itself, and the IT infrastructure for primary name and WhoIs servers within the .au namespace, it effectively runs much of the Internet in Australia. auDA and AusRegistry acknowledged the important roles they both play in promoting the Internet in Australia when the .au registration number hit 2 million in March, 2011.

Involvement Outside Australia

They also have become the domain managers for smaller nations in the region, such as the small island nation of Nauru. These deals are necessitated by the lack of formal infrastructure to provide national management of ones own ccTLD. The Solomon Islands relied on AusRegistry to develop their registration process from 2004-2007. Nauru, like the Solomon Islands before it, hopes that their current, beneficial deal with AusRegistry will eventually result in a national infrastructure that is able to take over management of the ccTLD.

International Division

AusRegistry Pty Group's International subsidiary, AusRegistry International, rebranded itself as of October, 2011 to ARI. The move was made to enhance its image abroad, and dispel the preoccupations that working with an Australian company meant uncertainty and risks for a non-Australian organization. Along with the rebranding annoucnement, ARI also announced that it would be the first registry to offer its customers the choice between two primary locations for the operation of a TLD registry. Establishing its location outside of Australia involved deploying registry infrastructure and resources to the United States.

Expansion into IDNs

AusRegistry has recently been solidifying their reputation as an international registry, domain manager, and software developer. They have secured deals with Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates to provide software support for their respective registry services. It is the first company in the world to provide the support necessary to carry these countries' Arabic-based IDN services live, and facilitate the use of Arabic as a primary Internet language. Given these solid partnerships, AusRegistry is poised to continue to grow throughout the region and become a power-player in IDNs. The Omani Telecommunications regulatory body commented that “AusRegistry International met the evaluation criteria and were the highest ranked respondents to the tender issued by the [Telecommunications Ministry] for the provision of a new Domain Name Registry System for Oman. As such, [we have] chosen to partner with AusRegistry International to establish a new Domain Name Registry System for Oman that will provide benefits to the Omani community for many years to come".

They also provide consultations for the operation of South Africa's .za ccTLD, which is the largest ccTLD in Africa. They were responsible for consolidating the disparate registries for .za SLDs into one, central registry.

New gTLD Services

AusRegistry became heavily involved in the promotion of new gTLDs in 2011, and they have focused their marketing efforts on promoting their registry back-end services. In September, 2011, one of the first public gTLD applicants, GJB Partners, announced that they would be contracting with AusRegistry for the back-end of their proposed .jewelers domain.

Interesting Facts about AusRegistry

AusRegistry's subsidiary, ARIAusRegistry International, that allows for people outside Australia to buy .au domain names.

AusRegistry, under contract to the Office of the Renewable Energy Regulator, a statutory authority founded to manage the Australian Government's Renewable Energy Act of 2000, is the operator of the Renewable Energy Certificates Registry.

On October 10th, 2010, AusRegistry reported that there were currently over 1.8 million .au domains registered, and over 1.6 million .com.au domains registered. The total number of .au and .com.au registered domains grew constantly since 2008 by about 300,000 new domains each year. They hit the 2 million mark in March, 2011.

Awards and Achievements

• 2002 Australian IT&T award
• 2003 MYOB/Telstra Victorian Government Small Business Award
• AusRegistry was the first registry in the world to fully implement, and go live with the EPP Protocol.

Affiliations

In 2010, Iron Mountain and AusRegistry signed a co-referral plan related to the new gTLD process. The plan calls for Iron Mountain to refer its clients looking to register as new gTLD registry operators to Ausregistry, while AusRegistry would refer those clients looking for data escrow services to Iron Mountain.

External links

• AusRegistry Group official website
  
• AusRegistry official website
  
• AusRegistry International official website

Country code top-level domain