The Raleigh, N.C.-based firm's Effusia for Windows IM offering includes features supporting one-to-one and broadcast messages, encrypted communications, central control over users' permissions and contact lists, and store-and-forward messaging.

With version 1.2, released this week, Effusia gains new server-side logging -- useful for companies that want to keep tabs on their employees' chat sessions for security purposes, or just bookkeeping. Out of the box, it offers XML logs, but can be tied into logging to a SQL database with a bit of configuration.

While those features are becoming commonplace for full-fledged enterprise IM systems, they're more of a rarity to find in products targeting small and medium-sized businesses -- which is where Liquid has placed its focus.

That strategy has its benefits. For one thing, it means Liquid won't be as impacted by the growing competition in the enterprise IM market among well-funded rivals. America Online, Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN, of course, are attempting to make names for themselves in corporate messaging by challenging established vendors, like IBM's Lotus division.

Going head-to-head with companies that can afford multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns could easily spell disaster for players like Liquid who have had products on the market for only a matter of months.

Additionally, the company stands to benefit from targeting firms that the big players might overlook. Most of the companies in Liquid's crosshairs fall in the under-500 employee realm.

"You find a lot of the players are looking to go after really big companies -- talking about integration with corporate portals and things like that," said Hayes Davis, Liquid's president and chief executive.

Yet while they have just a slim fraction of the employees of the financial services giants being courted by most of the IM world, small-to-medium-sized business are just as interested in enterprise messaging -- but are being underserved by vendors, he added.

"Small and medium businesses are companies that want the benefits of IM also, and they want it quick, and in a turnkey fashion," Davis said. "These are international businesses, and they need the same sort of real-time communications that the Fortune 500 companies need."

To better reach its target audience, Liquid is looking to build up its roster of partners. It already has an agreement with online community and chat technology vendor GlobalChat, and is looking to line up additional partners, particularly among IT consultancies.

"We're really looking to grow through partnerships," Davis said. "IM has some traction, but it still requires a good sell. It needs to come from people who are trusted by the customer."

While deployed behind the corporate firewall, Effusia offers encrypted chat across the wider Internet -- however, it only supports messaging to its proprietary client.

That won't change anytime soon, either, said Davis. Instead, the firm will continue to shy away from protocols like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) while there's still debate over whether either standard, or any, will be supported by the big public networks.

"We're looking forward to seeing a good standard ... but I think we're farther away from that than we were 15 months ago," he said. "When you have these [networks] in consumer instant messaging, we don't see it as being key and we haven't gotten that feeling from customers."

Christopher Saunders is managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.com.

Looking to make sense of all of the new instant messaging players for your business? Join us at the Instant Messaging Planet Spring Conference and Expo, Feb. 24 and 25 in Boston. Sessions include "Deploying Enterprise IM" and "Integrating IM Into a Traditional IT Structure."