IM Wars: Symantec, Verizon Announce Secure Messaging Solutions

The growing problem of securing instant-messaging (IM) applications came into focus this week as two major vendors announced new solutions. But only one of them will be of much use to VARs.

On Monday, Symantec announced IM Manager 8.0, which enables organizations to control the use of public IM services and enterprise RTC platforms, and to manage compliance with legal and corporate governance policies. The new version protects against worms, spam, viruses, phishing and other unwanted content. It features a behavior-based and network anomaly monitoring system to pre-empt IM threat outbreaks, and has granular policy controls that help enable application sharing, file sharing, audio, video and VoIP. It also supports all major public IM networks and enterprise platforms, as well as for enterprise IM offerings, such as Microsoft Live Communications Server, IBM/Lotus Sametime and Jabber.

IM Manager 8.0, which will be available to solution providers, is expected to roll out later this month; pricing was not announced.

Also this week, Verizon Business launched its own Hosted Secure IM Service, which will enable Verizon business customers to better manage employee use of IM, including enforcing ethics policies and appropriate communications rules. The solution comes in two flavors: Enterprise Instant Messaging and Managed Public Instant Messaging. The former is designed for companies looking for an IM communications service that operates only within their own networks.

Managed Public Instant Messaging is designed for companies that use public IM systems, such as MSN, Yahoo and AOL. It allows companies to determine which individuals can access specific IM networks while providing security protection.

The bad news for VARs is that Verizon is selling those services directly to its customers, setting itself up as a formidable competitor to channel-focused solutions from other vendors.

"We're launching it with Verizon first before looking at how to leverage it with other channels," says Rick Dyer, an IT solutions product manager for Verizon Business.

Verizon rakes in about $71 billion in annual revenue, and its new solution is both robust and cheap. It helps companies stop worms, viruses and "spim" (unsolicited chat messages from unknown users) before they enter a company's network. It costs $6.95 per month per mailbox.

The market for secure IM is large and continuing to grow. Last December, Gartner released a report stating that the enterprise IM market is projected to have a CAGR of about 20 percent through 2009. By 2010, the Gartner analysts say, 90 percent of users with business e-mail accounts will have IT-controlled IM accounts. According to Symantec, corporate adoption of IM has been growing at more than 200 percent per year, and IDC estimates that enterprise IM will grow from 40 million users today to more than 140 million by 2009.

According to the most recent Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, released in March, worms were the most predominant type of malicious code on all three large IM networks in the second half of 2005, representing 91 percent of IM-related malicious code. Also, more than 2,400 unique IM and peer-to-peer (P2P) threats were identified in 2005--a 1,700 percent increase from the previous year.