Communicator Inc. has announced the newest evolution of its real-time messaging technology: Hub Connex. This product incorporates the company's Hub IM, a secure enterprise IM solution that has been marketed since 2001, but Hub Connex is a significant advance over the baseline enterprise instant messaging platform, providing a variety of capabilities to support real-time secure communities.
Communicator Inc. has been involved in enterprise instant messaging since 1999, releasing a corporate IM solution based on the principles of secure instant messaging, identity authentication, and guarenteed delivery and receipt of messages. This product evolved into Hub IM based on the company's experience in with clients -- primarily in the financial services industry -- who wanted a closed, secure environment for real-time communication, as opposed to the more open and insecure world of consumer IM solutions.
Hub Connex is a significant advance over the company's earlier offerings, providing real-time content management and collaboration capabilities, and building on the hosted service platform that has proven attractive to its market.
On the content management front, Hub Connex supports a sophisticated content channels capability that links with nearly any information source, such as news services like Dow Jones or internal information sources. These dynamic channels can be managed through keyword and priority filters, and a consolidated view of all relevant information can be presented. Content channels can also be consolidated with other real-time events (like instant messages, or chat content) in a single alert window.
In Hub Connex, the company has extended the concept of real-time chat into persistent real-time forums. These have transcripts that are retained for the life of the forum, which supports long-term collaboration around business functions, project work, or other collaborative activities. A range of permission- and access-based controls are supported, to provide fine-grained management to forum content, as well as real-time alerting of new content.
Underlying all these collaborative and communication capabilities, Communicator Inc has developed a directory services infrastructure that provides presence-enabled global and personal contact information including email, telephone, and other contact information. The permission and access controls implemented allow for the creation of secure "gated communities," including secure collaborative groups across enterprise boundaries.
Communicator Inc. has learned from the financial services industry -- the most mature sector for real-time collaboration -- and has developed a breadth of functionality in Hub Connex that will accelerate real-time collaboration in other sectors as well. The company developed transactional support in the earlier Hum IM offering, so that, for example, bond traders could negotiate price for a deal and then actually transact the bond trade within the Hub IM environment. The same requirement for support of real-time transactions exists in many other industries, such as supply chain.
I have written about other companies -- such as Blueair Networks -- that are pursuing a similar vision in the manufacturing sector, although leveraging other companies' instant messaging platforms. And, of course, the enterprise IM giants -- Microsoft and IBM -- have alluded to visions of real-time collaboration that overlap with Hub Connex, at least in principle if not in specific functionality.
With the release of Hub Connex, Communicator Inc is moving centerstage within a redefined market sector. Instant messaging will soon be a commodity, provided like Internet access. But real-time communities -- secure collaborative environments -- that leverage and exploit presence, instant messaging, and the insatiable hunger of modern business for real-time communication -- that is going to be a huge and exploding market. And Communicator Inc. has definitely carved out a big foothold there with Hub Connex.
