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Corporate instant messaging got a needed ratings boost this week as a slew of leading financial firms announced plans to adopt a cross-industry secure IM service that will allow users to communicate instantly with colleagues and clients.

More than 30,000 employees and clients of Credit Suisse First Boston, The Goldman Sachs Group, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings, Merrill Lynch & Co., Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., Salomon Smith Barney Holdings, UBS Warburg, and 2000 institutional money management firms will be using Communicator's Communicator Hub IM service.

Communicator began working with the financial services industry in mid-2000 for its first industry-wide deployment of the Hub IM service, according to Communicator Hub IM product manager Gary Reifman. The financial institutions' unique requirements--including stringent regulatory requirements--had to be considered before the community IM hub could be deployed, Reifman says. One such demand involves archiving communications, which the service enables.

A Closed Messaging System

Hosted by the company, the IM service offers identity management, content aggregation, and customer support, as well as end-to-end 128-bit SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, Reifman says.

Reifman believes that this security, along with the service's ability to let companies decide who should have access to what information, is crucial to corporate adoption of IM.

Vic Simone, general manager of e-commerce at Goldman Sachs, says that his company has been working with the system in beta form for several months and so far has found it to be a helpful tool, allowing users to communicate crucial information in real time.

"The greatest value is that it's a defined community ... engaged in largely the same activities, so it makes the communication very valuable," Simone says.

Because this particular community consists of competitors who need to work closely together, a key feature of the system is its directory structure, which ensures each company's privacy.

"We control the address book and that's important because it's our collective client base," Simone says.

According to Simone, Goldman Sachs currently employs Communicator Hub IM only as a software application, but the company plans to deploy the browser version soon, allowing users more mobility and flexibility.

Multiparty Chat

Goldman Sachs seems to be getting good use out of the software deployment already, given users' ability to increase their communications significantly.

"You can chat with eight people at once but you can't have eight phone conversations at once," Simone says.

After tackling the complex requirements of building a hub IM system for the financial community, Communicator feels that it is ready to target the pharmaceutical industry, the chemical industry, and defense and government sectors, Reifman says.

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