Few would argue that these aren't a liability in any modern business. But they're the raison d'etre for firms like San Diego, Calif.-based Akonix, which today specializes in detecting and corralling public IM use in the enterprise.

Things are revving up for Akonix, which is moving from a late entrant in the competitive IM gateway arena -- it started out in the online community software industry -- to becoming a significant presence in the space, after having fielded an IM security product last year.

Like many vendors in the sector, the firm is seeing increased attention from companies in highly regulated industries, as well as firms in other verticals similarly concerned with protecting their intellectual property. That's contributing to a licensed user base "approaching six figures," according to Peter Coppola, vice president of product marketing at the 30-person firm.

In addition to client wins like a unit of ING Group and defense contractor SAIC, the firm also has an important new product upgrade in its corner.

Version 2.0 of its flagship Akonix L7 Enterprise, released about a month ago, adds a bevy of features to its lineup. Those include backend improvements -- like improved scalability and redundancy through clustering support, as well as automatic product updates -- in addition to enhanced protective measures.

Already, Windows-based L7 sits at the firewall to provide real-time, granular control over which employees have rights to use IM externally, share files, and so on. Once it registers all PCs in an enterprise -- say, using login scripts or other means -- it can automatically begin detecting and monitoring keyword activity from AIM, Yahoo! IM, MSN Messenger and ICQ, and associates that activity with a known user before applying restriction policies, if any. It also blocks all non-authorized IM traffic from those clients (and is likely to soon add some forms of IRC-blocking as well).

The product also integrates with IBM Lotus Sametime on archiving and reporting, but not on active integration of IM policies.

Version 2.0 adds support for new types of gateway implementations, including integration with Microsoft ISA Server 2000, HTTP tunneling, and DNS routing. In addition to support for NTLM authentication, it also now supports integration with LDAP and Novel Directory Services, and adds the ability to manage group policies by IP range.

Another new addition is L7's support for enterprise-controlled namespaces -- so that a company can dictate the format of IM handles that employees can use. For instance, IT staffers can ban company workers from using any IM handle unless it's in the format of "network logon name @ domain.com".

Theoretically, that's a feature of major importance, since it accomplishes much of what federated authentication efforts by the IM networks are looking to achieve: namely, demonstrating that company employees are who they purport to be over IM, and ensuring that they're using IM names that meet with company approval.

Still, there's no way of knowing on the outside whether an IM user is communicating from within a firm that's using Akonix L7, or whether they're just someimposter@domain.com. Ensuring that namespace guarantees are, in fact, being implemented by an enterprise and not an individual user would require the participation of a centralized naming authority -- and at this point, Akonix doesn't have relationships with the public IM networks, who currently are the ones in the best position to do that.

In addition to its support for an additional module offering McAfee anti-virus protection, Version 2.0 adds a second optional module that blocks the major P2P file-sharing applications. That module prohibits the practice unless it comes from specific IP addresses within the enterprise. (Enabling, for instance, a handful of authorized record company personnel to research which of their songs are showing up on Kazaa.)

"We focus on security," Coppola said. "In terms of public IM, we're trying to transform it into a useful application. Firewalls protect the network against certain threats but new threats are not covered by firewalls. We think there's a huge target of opportunity there."

Smaller-scale changes abound as well in version 2.0, which adds a function to ensure that company employees are using a specific version of the public IM client software (ideally, the most up-to-date.) It also provides for administrative broadcast messages and event-generated alerts, which can be distributed to predefined groups of users.

Version 2.0 also enhances the Akonix L7 API, which is being used by some of the firm's clients to write specialized compliance applications to access the gateway's archives, in accordance with SEC regulations.

In addition to product updates, Akonix also is busily exploring new ways to get its product out in the market. Earlier this week, the firm licensed L7 Enterprise to SurfControl, to manage businesses' IM and P2P activity as part of the Web and e-mail filtering firm's upcoming B2B offering, codenamed "Project Blackbeard." The offering will use Akonix's dynamic updates feature to keep deployments up-to-date with support for the latest IM and P2P protocol changes. SurfControl said it expects to launch Project Blackbeard during the spring.

The company also stands to benefit from e-mail archiving firm Legato Systems' new EmailXtender 4.4, which began shipping today with the ability to archive IM conversations, and which can work in tandem with L7.

In this scenario, Akonix L7 implements instant messaging policies, and passes conversation data to Mountain View, Calif.-based Legato's EmailXtender for archiving. (EmailXtender also is compatible with products from FaceTime Communications, one of the leaders in the IM gateway field.)

"The more we talked to the big customers we've got, the more we learned that we really needed to address an IM component," said Legato Chief Information Officer Bill Maguire. "We have made sure that we interface with Akonix and FaceTime -- I'll be using them to set policy about what traffic gets out and what stays behind the firewall, while I grab the logs, the reporting database and do some magic for storing it and archiving and recording that data."

Such alliances and continuing product improvements make the past 12 months a good year for Akonix as it maneuvers its way into the enterprise IM market. But the next 12 months no doubt will even more important, as the public IM providers ramp up their efforts to market their own gateways, while established rivals and new competitors in the security space ensure the industry's competitive landscape continues evolving.

Christopher Saunders is managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.com.