AXS-One, FaceTime Team

RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- AXS-One Inc. (AMEX:AXO), a leading provider of high-performance Records Compliance Management (RCM) software solutions and FaceTime Communications, the leading provider of solutions for securing and managing greynets, today announced a partnership to offer companies a highly scalable solution for security, compliance and archiving that embraces enterprise use of real-time communications such as instant messaging.

While e-mail continues to be the dominant medium of business communication, the use of instant messaging (IM) in the enterprise has clearly reached critical mass. The 2006 Workplace E-Mail, Instant Messaging & Blog Survey from the American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute, released earlier this month, reports that despite the widespread use of IM in the workplace—some reports place it at 90 percent—only 31 percent of companies have an IM policy in place and even fewer, 13 percent, actually retain IM business records. This trend poses additional challenges for companies already facing pressure from rising volumes of content in multiple formats, and increasingly stringent compliance regulations that require organizations to log, archive and audit all forms of electronic communications, with complex guidelines that mandate which communications must be retained and for how long. However, a potentially greater source of concern is the process of legal discovery—in the future, most discovery requests likely will ask for all IM communications related to the issue under litigation, just as they do for e-mail now, and companies unable to comply will face serious sanctions.

“For all intents and purposes, there’s no legal distinction between e-mail and IM, yet many organizations that archive e-mail continue to neglect IM, and they do so at their own peril,” said Bill Lyons, CEO, AXS-One. “It’s imperative that companies put technologies and processes in place to archive all communications, regardless of format, in accordance with the law, and before there’s a government inquiry of legal discovery order.”

AXS-One Inc.