The customer is a wholesale power generation company with facilities throughout North America.  Operations include competitive energy production, power marketing, thermal energy production, and resource recovery.  The company has net ownership of more than 24,000 MW of energy across forty-four facilities.

The Customer’s Challenge:  Replace an Unreliable IM Archiving System to Avoid Violations of Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Requirements

Regulatory compliance compels the customer to log and archive all electronic communications—including IM—related to their energy trading activities.  Two years ago, when IM correspondencewith the NYSE trading floor and with other trading houses began to increase (via AIM and other public IM systems), the customer deployed Akonix L7.

Unfortunately, Akonix L7 only created more problems:  The service would drop without notice.  It kept losing its connection to SQL.  Encrypted chats bypassed Akonix’s proxy servers.  The frustration was compounded by the inability of the vendor’s tech support team to resolve these problems.

Vital chats about trades were being lost, and the customer was in dire risk of violating compliance requirements.  Finally, after two long years, the customer decided it was time to replace their current systems.  Step one was to replace public IM access with IBM Lotus Sametime.  But although Sametime logs chats, it lacks search and discovery capabilities; to address those requirements, the customer called upon the enterprise IM experts at Instant Technologies.

Instant Solution:  Instant IMtegrity Archives

The Results:  Regulatory Compliance and Peace of Mind

The customer’s Network Security Manager summarizes the project’s results with this illuminating statement:  “I would not sleep at night if we were still using Akonix,” he says.  “Instant IMtegrity Archives is 100% stable, and we are very happy with it.”

“Instant IMtegrity’s reliability and robust discovery capabilities provide the customer with the peace of mind that comes from knowing they can comply quickly and completely to regulatory audits,” says Peyton McManus, President of Instant Technologies.  “We take great pride in the fact that not one of our IMtegrity customers has a single known issue with the product.”

“Instant IMtegrity Archives came very highly recommended,” says the Project Manager for the customer’s Infrastructure Support Team.  “I second that endorsement, but I’d also like to take it one step further—Monique Leyda, our account manager at Instant, was invaluable to this project.  She helped us build the business case necessary to win approval to proceed, and she coordinated direct discussions with Instant’s developers for some custom requirements we had.  Monique sincerely cared more about ensuring we had a successful project than she did about selling us a product.”