FOSTER CITY, Calif.-June 16, 2003 -- Building upon over four
years of experience delivering enterprise infrastructure and
business solutions that extend the power of instant messaging (IM)
and other forms of real-time communications in the enterprise,
FaceTime Communications today announced IM Director, a highly
flexible and scalable, next generation server that serves as the
cornerstone of the company's enterprise IM management suite of
security, management and control solutions for real-time
communications in the enterprise. With IM Director, IT executives
can take a phased approach to the controlled adoption and
management of IM, managing new and emerging usage
challenges-including virus attacks and inadvertent dissemination of
proprietary company information-in a highly-scalable, customizable
and cost-effective fashion.
According to META Group estimates, the number of employees using
IM services for business will grow from 20-25 million in 2003 to 95
million by 2007, representing a penetration rate of approximately
80% potential new business users.
As the power and benefits of IM continue to be exploited for a
myriad of market and industry-specific business functions, it is
imperative that the unique risks presented by the diverse uses of
IM be managed by an equally specialized and extensible solution.
FaceTime IM Director features an extendable architecture with
support for real-time communications ingrained in its core design
fabric to deliver greater flexibility and cost efficiency in
managing risks that arise from all forms of IM usage in any type of
business.
IM Director is deployed behind a company's corporate firewall for
the management and control of heterogeneous IM clients and services
in the enterprise. It can be licensed as a standalone management
and control server or used in combination with FaceTime's
enterprise IM management suite of security and management
solutions. In addition, an array of optional add-on components
provide simplified integration with best-of-breed virus scanning,
e-mail storage and other solutions. As a complement to all public,
private and enterprise IM offerings, IM Director provides
significant value-add for securing, managing and controlling all IM
use in the enterprise.
"Businesses today are seeing widespread adoption of multiple
instant messengers by their employees," said Genelle Hung, a market
analyst with The Radicati Group, Inc. "Even as companies roll out
enterprise IM solutions for internal communications, employees
still have an important need to communicate externally with their
customers and partners. It's critical for IT organizations to have
flexible solutions such as FaceTime's that can secure, manage and
control both internal and external IM use."
FaceTime's best-of-breed enterprise IM management suite of
security and management solutions relies on IM Director's core
management and control functionality, and include:
IMAuditor, the industry standard for regulatory compliance:
IMAuditor, now in its fourth release, extends the core management
and control capabilities of IM Director by adding specific features
that are critical for regulatory compliance, including strict
real-time logging, group and individual auditing, and sophisticated
management reporting of all IM traffic on any IM network. IMAuditor
seamlessly integrates with FaceTime's technology partner solutions
for email content scanning, archiving, natural language processors
and WORM drive storage infrastructure. These complete, end-to-end
solutions provide for consistent and reliable processes to ensure
all forms of electronic communications-including IM, Web chat and
email-are in compliance with auditing workflow regulations. The
award-winning IMAuditor has been deployed by more than 100 leading
finance, energy, healthcare and other regulated
organizations.
IM Guardian, the DMZ solution for real-time network security (see
today's related FaceTime announcement):
IM Guardian extends the core real-time management and control
capabilities of the FaceTime IM Director solution. Deployed in the
corporate DMZ, IM Guardian acts as a security gateway for real-time
communications, providing protection from application
vulnerabilities, management and control with policies for
application behavior, dynamic port negotiation, network usage
statistics and anti-virus scanning for file transfers.
IM Presence Manager, for business portal presence extension and
community management:
IM Presence Manager enables presence to be embedded in enterprise
workflow applications such as Web-based portals. It provides
presence and availability management for registered users, presence
aggregation for communities of related users, and presence-based
decision making for business process workflows such as connecting
buyers and sellers together for customer service. IM Presence
Manager builds on IM Director to provide enterprise-class
scalability and reliability.
IM Call Center, for integrating IM networks and presence into
customer service:
IM Call Center builds upon FaceTime's four-year history of
providing hundreds of customers with the industry's first solutions
that integrate IM networks and presence into existing customer
service processes. IM Call Center is a unique and innovative
solution that allows businesses to leverage IM for rapid and
personalized customer service with consumers and business partners
outside the company while lowering call center costs through more
efficient call escalation and faster call resolution across
multiple support levels. IM Call Center extends the capabilities of
IM Director by providing call center specific features such as IM
BizBuddy-the 1-800 equivalent of IM-and, through FaceTime's unique
IM network partnership relationships, true multi-network
interoperability for fluid customer-to-specialist communications.
In addition to substantially lowering support costs, companies can
leverage IM across their distributed call centers to dramatically
improve agent productivity and service level performance.
IM Director offers customers investment protection by providing
all the core management and control functionality required to
safely and securely deploy IM in today's heterogeneous,
multi-network enterprises as well as through expansion into
specialized applications areas.
"IM Director's architecture combined with our complete suite of IM
solutions provides customers with a clear growth path, so they can
efficiently and cost-effectively address their unique IM needs,"
said Christopher S. Dean, SVP marketing and business development of
FaceTime Communications. "IM Director provides customers in any
market a powerful way to address their instant messaging management
challenges, while enabling them to protect their technology
investments as they extend IM into their application infrastructure
going forward."
IM Director's power as an extendable solution is further validated
by FaceTime's long history of close, collaborative partner
alliances as well as the largest customer base in the
industry.
"With a strong ecosystem of partners and over 250 enterprise
customers, FaceTime continues to lead the market with innovative
technologies that allow businesses to easily integrate and extend
large-scale, enterprise-grade IM solutions across the entire
organization," Dean added.
IM Director is built on the proven FaceTime Communications
Platform, a powerful patent pending real-time session, identity and
presence management communications platform that delivers
interoperability, application services and software development
capabilities. All products built on the FaceTime Communications
Platform come with a set of APIs enabling developers to extend the
power of real-time presence and IM communications into existing
corporate applications.
IM Director offers key functionality in three areas: 1) detection,
2) management, control and administration, 3) extension:
Detection:
* Detects use of any public, private or enterprise IM network and
client
* Reports on network usage though comprehensive statistical
reports
* Automatically detects employees' corporate identities, mapping
them to IM screen or buddy names
* Provides advanced corporate directory integration
Management, Control and Administration:
* Interoperability and control capabilities for any public,
private or enterprise IM network and client
* Centralized management of corporate IM policies through
Web-based user interface
* Enterprise-class user and role administration for global
deployments
* IM control preferences and permissions at enterprise,
department/group and individual employee level
* Local routing of public IM communications to minimize
information going beyond corporate firewall
* Extensive logging and archiving capabilities for information and
risk management
* Advanced real-time monitoring and policy enforcement with
ability to intercept compromising content
* Advanced reporting empowers IT to view the company's IM usage
patterns and statistics in real time through comprehensive visual
reports; includes the ability to identify groups, employees and
outsiders that are most active; uses pie charts and bar graphs to
navigate among the multitude of statistics organized by IM network,
group, and employee
Extension:
* IM Director's core management and control functionality extend
to FaceTime's enterprise IM management suite of security and
management solutions, enabling multi-level security, management and
control of real-time communications
* Provides APIs for exploiting and extending real-time event
management capabilities, communications and presence to other
enterprise applications
* Integrates IM with existing corporate policies through filters
(virus, spam, content, access)
Key Benefits:
* Flexible enterprise-class architecture with availability on
Windows, Linux Solaris operating systems as well as compatibility
with Microsoft Server solutions and Oracle database
* Core management and control functionality extended to FaceTime's
enterprise IM management suite of IM security and management
solutions providing technology investment protection and clear
application upgrade path
* Array of optional add-on components and functional industry-
specific applications
* Increased productivity brought by IM to the enterprise by
supporting the familiar user experience and removing the risks
inherent in public IM use
IM Director will be generally available in Q3 2003. For additional
sales information, FaceTime can be reached at
http://www.facetime.com/imwithus.htm, (888) 349-FACE, or via IM
screen name FaceTimeLive.
FaceTime provides its customers with a comprehensive approach to
the centralized security, management and control of real-time
communications in the enterprise. The company's enterprise IM
management suite of solutions enables IT organizations to apply
standard business use policies to all diverse methods of real-time
communications on any public, private or enterprise network.
About Actiance
Actiance helps organizations manage, secure and ensure compliance
across unified communications, collaboration and Web 2.0
applications such as blogs, wikis and social networks. Actiance's
award-winning platforms are used by 9 of the top 10 US banks and
284 FINRA regulated firms globally.
The Actiance platform allows organizations to gain visibility of
applications in use, apply usage and content policies, ensure
compliance and gain valuable insights across the communications and
collaboration channels. Actiance supports all leading social
networks, unified communications and collaboration providers and IM
platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Yahoo!,
AOL, Skype, Cisco, Microsoft, Jive, and IBM.
Actiance is headquartered in Belmont, California. For more
information visit or call 888-349-3223.
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