Certification authority and security solutions provider GlobalSign (globalsign.com) announced on Thursday that it has achieved a 6.1 percent increase in the number of issued SSL certificates in July, according to a recent report by Netcraft (netcraft.com).

GlobalSign says with this increase, it has "eclipsed" the growth rate of the number of certificates issued by other certification authorities, namely VeriSign whose market share is believed to have fallen by 0.65 percent.

The company also believes this recent statistic reinforces GlobalSign's standing as "VeriSign's most significant enterprise level competitor."

According to the company's most recent announcement, some of this growth seems to be attributed to the global expansion GlobalSign has seen so far this year. During 2008, GlobalSign launched several new SSL deployment and installation technologies for hosting companies and "further bolstered its enterprise services after identifying shortcomings in offerings by the competition."

GlobalSign also noted significant momentum in its partner program for web hosts and ISPs.

"2008 has been a very successful year for GlobalSign with the launch of a variety of new services and impressive momentum in its SSL Partner Program," says John Murray, VP of sales at GlobalSign. "GlobalSign is making waves in what was previously a stagnant SSL market dominated by just one or two players. For the remainder of 2008, GlobalSign plans to continue disrupting the SSL market with announcements of more satisfied customers and partners taking advantage of services that are unrivalled in their ease-of use, reliability, functionality and most importantly, cost effectiveness."

Earlier this week, GlobalSign announced that Adobe AIR applications can now be secured by GlobalSign code signing certificates to enhance end-user confidence in applications running on Adobe's runtime environment.

The company also recently began offering a "secure everything / multi-domain" option for its SSL certificate range.