Instant Chat Campaign

Instant messaging might not hog as much network space as multiple Lord of the Rings downloads, but it can pose problems. Aside from bandwidth issues, many managers find it hard to track the panoply of IM software versions on user PCs. (Microsoft, Time Warner's America Online unit, Yahoo, IBM's Lotus division, Sun Microsystems and Oracle all make a corporate version of IM.) Just 26 percent of organizations have standardized on a common corporate IM application, according to market researchers at The Radicati Group.

Yet IM software is now installed within 90 percent of all corporate networks, according to research firm Osterman Research. Often it's used by employees to get real work done. But some CIOs view it as a bandwidth-sucking productivity blaster.

"It's a huge problem," says Richard Ortiz, IT manager at Palace Entertainment, which runs water and amusement parks. Ortiz says he kept noticing strange spikes in traffic on his frame relay routers last year. So he used network reports to hunt down the culprit. It was IM. "The guys are worse than the girls," says Ortiz. "They play poker. They're talking to their friends about the football game." In October 2003, Ortiz ended the fun, installing Akonix Systems software, which, like similar products including SurfControl's Instant Message Filter, blocks IM use and helps stop end users from downloading pirated software and peer-to-peer file-sharing.

Akonix works by grabbing packets related to the application and blocking them from leaving the network. It also tells Ortiz who is trying to do what. "If Mary Jo in New York is downloading illegal software from Kazaa, it runs a report. She gets a [pop-up] message that says what she's trying to do isn't company policy and that it will be reported to a manager," Ortiz says. The reports are working. During the first week of using Akonix, 60 people received warning notices advising them that IM was no longer allowed. "Now we barely have 10 or five" offenders per week, he says.

Operation Auto Respond

For the worst nuisances - e-mail maintenance, antivirus updates and server software upgrades - companies are finding that automation works by saving time and labour. For Ron Rose, CIO of Priceline.com, the biggest headache used to be the hands-on part of software upgrades. Priceline's business, which allows Web users to haggle the prices they pay for airfare, hotel rooms and other services, is powered by a farm of 300 Microsoft Windows servers that require between 100 and 200 software changes each per month, Rose says. "Before, we had a team of six people applying application updates on a machine-by-machine basis to each of the servers," he says. "It would take up to an hour to deploy the software to a small group of the servers manually - every time we had to do an update."

Now, Rose uses BladeLogic to consistently deploy software upgrades to not only Windows servers but to the company's Sun Microsystems servers too. Others providing similar data-centre automation offerings include IBM's Tivoli, CenterRun (acquired in 2003 by Sun Microsystems), Moonlight Systems and Opsware. Rose figures the technology has made a 50 percent increase in the efficiency of technicians doing software loading by eliminating all the hours they once spent manually loading software onto servers and debugging machines that were misconfigured during that manual process.