Applications /

WiredRed audits corporate IM traffic

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World, 06/24/02

SAN DIEGO - WiredRed Software has added an auditing and reporting capability to its secure, private instant-messaging software to meet new regulatory requirements facing industries such as financial services and healthcare.

WiredRed's e/pop Audit and Reporting Server ships this month and serves as an add-on to the company's flagship e/pop enterprise instant-messaging software, which also supports text chat, application sharing and voice-over-IP calls.

Among e/pop's 3,000 corporate customers are law firms such as Baker & McKenzie and Arnold & Porter and government agencies, including the Department of Labor and the Air Force. WiredRed says its software supports more than 2 million end users.

The new audit and reporting software archives e/pop traffic, filters messages for particular keywords, compiles regular reports and provides supervisory access to employee communications. It captures the date, time and content of instant messages, chat sessions and attachments. A data mining capability supports queries, and auditing data can be exported to Microsoft and Oracle databases.

With its audit and reporting add-on, WiredRed is targeting financial services firms that need to comply with new Securities and Exchange Commission and National Association of Security Dealers requirements regarding the recording and archival of instant messages. WiredRed is eyeing similar requirements under the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which affects hospitals and insurance companies.

One early customer of the auditing add-on is Terra Nova Trading, a Chicago online brokerage firm. Terra Nova has 100 employees who have been using WiredRed's e/pop software for the last three months.

"We're trying to give our traders tools to be able to make better decisions, react quicker and provide better service," says David Lipsett, vice president of Terra Nova.

Terra Nova just started testing the auditing add-on and is pleased with the software's performance so far.

"We are required by law to have auditing and reporting," Lipsett says. "If you say you placed an order with the trade desk to buy 100 shares of Microsoft, but instead the trader sold 100 shares, we can evaluate that discrepancy immediately by checking the log."

During the next six months, Terra Nova plans to integrate e/pop's capabilities with its trading systems to let customers chat directly with client services representatives. But for now, the software is used for internal communications only.

Another early user of the e/pop auditing add-on is Metairie Bank in Louisiana. This midsize bank recently switched from Microsoft's Instant Messenger to WiredRed's e/pop for security reasons, says IT Manager Chris Dodge.

"We looked at a number of other internal instant-messaging systems, but we decided to use WiredRed . . . because it seemed to have the most functionality and features and user-friendliness," Dodge says. "So far, the performance has been excellent."

Dodge says the auditing and reporting add-on "was very thorough with logging everything. But right now, we're not required by the feds to monitor our internal messaging, so I don't feel it's necessary to spend the extra money. If and when it does become required, this would be our solution."

Financial services is the sweet spot for corporate instant messaging, which is not yet a mainstream enterprise application, says Mark Levitt, research director for IDC's Collaborative Computing program.

"[Instant messaging] is considered a freebie; it's not in the top IT project list for most corporations,'' Levitt says. "But if you're going to do [instant messaging], then you need auditing and logging."

WiredRed's e/pop and e/pop Audit and Reporting Server run on any Windows platforms and will soon be available for Linux. Pricing for the auditing add-on starts at $4,000 for up to 100 users, while the instantmessaging client software cost about $40 per person.

Later this year, WiredRed plans to introduce a version of e/pop that works in extranet environments, followed by a consumer-oriented version that supports Web and wireless access.