As IM Grows, so Do the Number of Vendor Message-Logging Products

Global Relay Communications (booth 2505), a provider of outsourced enterprise-class message archiving, compliance and management services, is launching its Enterprise IM solution, based on the vendor's Jabber product, which can be fully integrated with the vendor's message archive solution, its flagship product.

The vendor's products cover e-mail and instant messaging (IM) compliance solutions for securities brokerage, banking, healthcare and other highly regulated industries. Its enterprise solutions provide integration across multiple applications, systems and platforms through a host of communication and messaging capabilities with a unified storage archive that is searchable, and includes perimeter security, according to the vendor. "It's what the business is founded on and is the basis of all of our compliance solutions and messaging services, says Warren Roy, cofounder, president and CEO of Global Relay Communications.

Jabber is a collection of open, XML-based protocols for instant messaging and presence information. Jabber-based software is deployed on thousands of servers across the Internet. Roy says Jabber is just starting to gain a wider degree of acceptance primarily due to Google's adoption of it. "We want to make a splash at the show by giving away a fully compliant archiving system and having it built on top of the Jabber standard," says Roy.

The genesis for Global Relay's Enterprise IM solution was inspired by SEC rules and the mass migration of more users adopting IM over e-mail as their preferred method of communication.

"A year ago maybe 10 percent of our customers were on IM," says Roy. "Today it's about 95 percent. So as the whole industry moves toward real-time communications, the SEC has taken a very strong stand that they are going to enforce their policy of capturing and archiving all the electronic messages."

Roy says this creates two separate issues: How do you capture the public IM (e.g., AOL, MSN, Yahoo!) space, and how do you deal with the security aspects? A large group of concerned firms do not want IM communications going out over the Internet in plain text. In response, they are starting to implement proprietary systems that they control, according to Roy.

"Anyone on Global Relay's IM solution can talk to anyone on Google Talk because it has all of the security protocols associated with it and no advertising," says Roy. "It's a logical solution for the financial services sector because ours is fully integrated to the component within our best archiving product. Simply having a message archiving solution is of little value unless you have the archiving and monitoring associated with it."