Enterprises get the Instant Message

What's in it for the enterprise, then?
Lots of things you can't do with the ordinary systems. We do name management, so you can make IM names conform to the company IT naming standards when someone joins, and remove them efficiently when they leave. You can give users selective access to the different networks, control spam and scan for viruses. And you can watch who uses what, how much and what they're saying. We can archive messages, so you get to extend your records policy into IM.

Is there really a problem with security and IM? It seems inherently harmless. Should smaller companies really need to worry about it?
Any company that's bought a firewall should think about this -- it's just as important as managing your Web or email use. More than half of IM users have accepted a file transfer without knowing what it was. Discovering IM use, securing it and recording it -- it's very valuble.

Do you handle encryption for the messages themselves?
Sometimes, sometimes not. We support 12 networks, and they have many different ways to do things.

When you archive messages, do you store the encrypted version or do you store the clear version: if the latter, does the clear version ever travel over the network?
The clear version never leaves the company but yes, in some cases it can travel over the internal network to the archive. The different systems have different ways of doing this.

What's happening to standardisation on protocols?
We expect the various networks to quickly see feature parity, so they'll all offer similar tools.

But that's not the same as speaking the same protocols. Is there movement towards this?
The protocols and the underlying technology -- there's some movement towards standardisation, and some movement away. Some people are going towards SIP and Simple, but they're not defined in enough detail to be complete yet. How do you handle subscriptions under SIP? That's not clear. But like email, where you had many different standards on all the different networks before SMTP came along, there'll be a coalescing into one standard at some point

Since your business is translating between incompatible networks, presumably you're not looking forward to that point.
Our market is tied to the IM market. With email, the market exploded when there was a standard. We'll see the same thing with IM – not only pockets of use in companies. The moment there's clarity about standards, there'll be a skyrocketing.

When will that be?
Ah, that's a question. In 1997, in the fall, we formed an IETF group. Can't be that long until we're there, I thought. Six years later, we're still waiting. But I'm actively agitating for standards