Akonix Systems, Inc.

Akonix Systems, Inc. was founded in early 2000 with a vision that Instant Messaging (IM) and other emerging real-time communications technologies were going to become a critical part of the corporate communications infrastructure. At the time, employees were just beginning to bring Instant Messaging into the enterprise as a business tool, albeit one without corporate sanction or control. We saw that as Instant Messaging use grew, corporations would require new solutions for effectively taking advantage of the power of Instant Messaging technology to ensure that Instant Messaging was: Secure: protecting the corporate network and confidential information Controlled: allowing IT to centrally manage and monitor Compliant: meeting government and industry regulations Manageable: enabling flexible, granular policies on employee Instant Messaging use Integrated: leveraging investments in IT infrastructure such as directory, archiving, security and other systems Since then, Instant Messaging has grown faster than anyone predicted. In 2004 there are an estimated 364 million corporate users of IM. This year, Gartner Group named IM as the Number One Technology to Watch for 2005. Virtually every organization (over 90% according to Osterman Research) has Instant Messaging users within their network.