Suiting Up Instant Messaging For The Enterprise

Consumer IM products such AOL Time Warner's AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), have made millions of users addicts, who then take their habit to work, where security concerns immediately crop up.

Now, vendors such as Boston-based IMlogic are coming to the fore with technology that makes IM more secure, more trackable, more archivable and more enterprise-friendly. IMlogic on Monday plans to unveil IM Manager, which maps IM screen names to corporate identities so IT can more easily figure out who on the network is using IM and report on their activity.

IM Manager upgrades the company's existing IMLog product so that it not only archives messages and reports on them, but also claims to offer security, archiving and compliance,all in one solution, said Jeff Whitney, vice president of marketing and channel programs at IMLogic.

The price of IM Manager for 500 users ranges from $50,000 to $60,000, depending on configuration.

FaceTime Communications, Foster City, Calif., is a pioneer in the IM management field, which has seen a boom since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act mandated that financial companies better track and store all internal electronic communication, including instant messages. In the past year, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York State Attorney General's office used internal corporate e-mail to investigate financial analysts who allegedly publicly recommended stocks that they privately disparaged in internal communications.

The legislation, passed last July, "has been good for business," said Glen Vondrick, president and CEO of FaceTime. The company's IM Audit product works with most IM programs and archives and controls internal use, stripping out users' ability to send file attachments, for example. In the interest of full disclosure, IM Audit pops up a message when they initiate a chat to alert them that their conversations are being recorded and archived, he said.

IMlogic, likewise, said its product works with popular IM solutions from AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo, as well as more corporate-friendly products such as Lotus Sametime.

Kirkland, Wash.-based Linqware is also offering up corporate-savvy e-mail. See related story.

"Our product gives IT visibility into IM usage. They drop our server in behind the firewall, and it'll show them the number of users [and how much traffic is being generated, and they can turn off file transfer or keep viruses out," said Francis deSouza, president and CEO of IMlogic.

Until now, the company has been focusing on direct sales. It is now seeking out solution providers and resellers to entrench the product.

IM is certainly a hot topic among vendors. FaceTime last week said it is integrating McAfee Security's antivirus scanning technology in its products.

"IM is the most rapidly growing communication mechanism ever and caught companies totally by surprise. Now they're scrambling because IM poses significant risks, not only from viruses diving in through IM but also because it allows people to share files in an unsecure manner," IMlogic's Whitney said.

And some solution providers are forging their own way. After Enron, even non-financial comapnies are "looking for ways to cover their backs" legally and are also moving towards corporate standards, said Carl Tyler, vice president of marketing for Principle Software, a Cambridge, Mass. based VAR specializing in mail and instant messaging. Principle even built its own Chat Logger product for use with Lotus Sametime corporate instant messaging product, he noted.

FaceTime and IMlogic are both looking more to solution providers with IT infrastructure expertise to recommend, install and sell their products. Until they ramp up their channel programs, the companies might want to keep an eye on the larger IM vendors who will undoubtedly start adding their own tracking, archiving and reporting capabilities over time, observers said.

"IM will develop like e-mail, with the big vendors at first focusing on core systems capability and then adding in other stuff. Smaller companies initially will do peripheral products, and then companies like Lotus and Microsoft will step in," said Matt Cain, vice president of research firm Meta Group.

IBM's Lotus Software group, which explored the use of safer corporate IM with Sametime, is taking a close look at compliance issues as the technology becomes more mainstream, said Bethann Cregg, manager of advanced collaboration solutions at the Cambridge, Mass.-based company. "We stay abreast of that and are helping customers implement the kinds of solutions they want with our own services organization, but [we are not coming out with our own compliant applications except through business partners," Cregg said.