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When you say discussions, blogs, wikis, ratings, this is just obviously the continuation of consumer technologies becoming more into the enterprise?

Certainly. I was just at the Office 2.0 conference last week. A lot of people are thinking about how do you apply all of these Web 2.0 trends. A lot of which is hot air, but there's some real stuff in there, too. You know, making the applications easier to use, more focused on end user, focused on collaboration so that it's easier to apply groups working on problems such as tagging. Share my tags with everybody and see what people are browsing. That's a good example of bringing collaboration to a process that just didn't have it before.

So definitely that's part of what we're doing. Bringing more of these things that have been adopted by consumers into business. But not in a way that embraces hype. In a way that actually solves business problems.

So the most I've heard about IM in a long time, and this might seem like it's out of left field, but the old Mark Foley intern page scandal.

Uh-huh.

The pages saving the IMs … I think that's …

When not to archive (laughs). I think that's an interesting question. Gartner has actually said don't archive unless you have to. The issue for a lot of organizations is that now they are subject to Sarbanes-Oxley, and if they have financial data that's going over their IM network or their email network, for example, then legally they have to do some archiving. So I think that companies, and, uh, senators … people should be smart about what they do with their data. You want to find the best mix of protecting privacy and also archiving for legal reasons.

So tell me about how open source IM products are disrupting the proprietary IM market.

People are looking for a couple of things from the open source perspective. They're attracted by lower licensing fees, and that drives a lot of adoption. But they also want a more customizable platform.

One example of that is the state of Kentucky [Kentucky's Homeland Security Office]. What they want to do is deploy IM to all of their emergency vehicles. And they needed the ability to -- a very simple feature -- the ability to do night-vision mode. So that if you're in a squad car at night, you don't want a whole bunch of white background with black text, because it kind of washes out your night vision. And so they needed the ability to click a button and make everything in more muted colors. … Because we've built the client and the server to be very customizable … it was very easy to do that customization for them.

That's a very interesting and unusual example. Night vision? And you couldn't do that with a proprietary IM?

My understating is that they actually tried to do it with Microsoft's product - maybe not that feature specifically - but they tried to adapt Microsoft's solution, and you know it just wasn't as flexible. So open source gets you flexibility. Not just the ability to get into the source code, but because we built it to be a very customizable, flexible platform with things like plug-in support. But also lower licensing fees.

What's happened on the email side is that companies have become locked into Exchange from Microsoft. … And they want more choice. They want some alternatives. And so they're looking around. What's reasonable to use. What has a good feature set. What's not too expensive.

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