Press Release

FaceTime Announces Next Generation IM Server for Enterprise IT Management and Control of Instant Messaging

FaceTime IM Director Helps Organizations Streamline Deployment and Management Costs of Heterogeneous Instant Messaging Use in the Enterprise

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 FaceTime Communications
FaceTime Communications enables the safe and productive use of instant messaging, Web usage and Unified Communications platforms. Ranked number one by IDC for four consecutive years, FaceTime's award-winning solutions are used by more than 900 customers – including nine of the 10 largest U.S. banks – for security, management and compliance of real-time communications. FaceTime supports or has strategic partnerships with all leading public and enterprise IM network providers, including AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Skype, IBM and Jabber.

FaceTime is headquartered in Belmont, California. For more information visit http://www.facetime.com or call 888-349-FACE. The FaceForward blog, at http://blog.facetime.com, offers thoughts and opinions about the changing nature of Internet communications.

PR Contact:

Joshua Barnes
A&R Edelman
650-762-2865
joshua.barnes@ar-edelman.com