Update: Omnipod beefs up instant messaging service

Hosted IM gains Web-based client, telephony, persistent-chat

However, he quickly realized IM had by then become a required business tool for his employees and brought in the Omnipod system. Omnipod fits in with Benefit Strategies' overall IT strategy of contracting out as many IT systems as possible to hosted service providers. Benefit Strategies, a small company with about 48 employees, wants to free up its two IT staffers as much as possible to do strategic IT work and not bog them down with day-to-day maintenance work, he said.

Benefit Strategies has been so pleased with Omnipod that it has begun to buy extra licenses to distribute to its own clients at its own cost, a move that has been very well received, Smith said. "It has a great deal of marketing appeal to be able to give them that instant service." Moreover, when meeting with new clients, Smith mentions the Omnipod system as part of the advantages his company is able to offer, he said.

Omnipod is also preparing an integration feature with a telephony provider to let users launch voice conference calls from within the Omnipod IM interface, Stein said. The telephony feature, slated for next year's first quarter, would give the Omnipod system the ability to automatically contact users at a variety of previously stored phone lines -- office phones, cellular numbers, IP (Internet Protocol) systems -- and bring them into the conference call bridge, Stein said. Users wouldn't necessarily have to be logged on to the Omnipod IM system, he said.

"You don't have to look for those numbers, nor go to a third-party Web site and type in all the numbers, nor send e-mail to people nor call them up and tell them you're doing a conference call," said Stein, who wasn't ready to identify Omnipod's telephony partner.

Finally, Omnipod is getting ready to add a persistent-chat feature to its system. This feature would create chat rooms in which multiple users can participate at different times, while the entire thread of the conversation remains available for all to see, he said. "It's a way to continue the conversation and allow people to join later and see the history of what's transpired," Stein said.

New York City-based Omnipod, which has seen its revenue quadruple since last year and expects to become profitable during 2005's first half, is benefitting from many companies' desire to move their employees away from the public, consumer-oriented IM networks from the likes of America Online Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN unit, Stein said. Omnipod's hosted service offers an alternative to the enterprise IM systems from vendors such as Microsoft and IBM Corp., which require considerable attention and management from internal IT staffs, he said.

Traditionally, companies wanting to provide IM to their employees have had two choices: first, let employees use a public IM network and have the IT department secure and manage IM use via an IM gateway installed on a corporate server; or second, buy a self-enclosed, end-to-end enterprise IM system such as Microsoft's Live Communications Server (LCS) or IBM's Sametime.

"Companies are starting to realize they have to get rid of consumer IM," he said. "It doesn't matter how good your gateway provider is. If the consumer IM network you rely on for your business is down, you're out of luck." He doesn't see his company competing with LCS or Sametime, because those aren't hosted applications.