"We welcome Communicator Hub IM as a means to enhance real-time communications with clients, colleagues and market participants," said Vic Simone, managing director of e-Commerce at Goldman Sachs. "Communicator Hub IM provides clients with an additional secure, convenient tool to access, leverage and capture value from our sales, trading and research platform."

"Companies are being besieged by their employees who want instant messaging to communicate with their fellow employees and, more importantly, with their customers and partners. Until Communicator Hub IM, the market has lacked a secure, business quality instant messaging service for communities of competitors with common customers," said Leo Schlinkert, CEO of Communicator Inc. "Communicator Inc chose the institutional financial industry as the lead for Communicator Hub IM because of its stringent performance, regulatory and security requirements. Communicator Hub IM's flexibility enables it to meet the needs of companies in industries such as pharmaceuticals, energy, chemicals and government."

According to the market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), about 70 percent of companies have employees that use IM services. Companies are at increasing risk using consumer IM services to conduct business communications. Lack of encryption, non-repudiation, digital identity and message retention may lead to a system failure, a compliance lapse or a lost customer. Companies need an IM solution built for business communication.

Communicator Hub IM mitigates the business, operational and legal risks associated with other IM services by enabling businesses and industries to build large scale, secure, "gated" multi-company communities, in which each customer maintains control of its own employee and customer directories.

"Our employees and clients require a reliable and secure way to send and receive messages instantly; their productivity depends on it," said John Casaudoumecq, managing director and head of Global Fixed Income e-commerce for Salomon Smith Barney. "We looked at third party Internet messaging systems, but information security is crucial in this business and we were not comfortable leaving ours in the hands of an open Internet provider. Communicator Hub IM addressed these concerns, and Communicator Inc delivered it to us quickly and at a reasonable rate."

IDC estimates that the global instant messaging market will increase more than ten-fold in the next three years, from $18.4 million in 2002 to $229.2 million in 2005. The amount companies pay for IM is expected to grow from $133 million this year to $1.1 billion by 2005.

"Instant messaging is becoming much more pervasive as a collaborative CRM tool, and services like Communicator Hub IM will help to set that trend," said Robert Mahowald, senior research analyst for IDC. "These services provide an efficient way for companies with complex communication needs to build communities of competitors with common customers."

"Communicator Inc has found a way to create community out of the fierce and regulated competitors in the securities industry by connecting brokers, dealers and institutional money managers. By working with their eight broker/dealer partners and their clients, Communicator Inc will create a virtual industry-wide directory," said Larry Tabb, vice president of the Securities & Investments Practice at TowerGroup. "By leveraging this directory, firms will not only be able to securely message their trading and banking partners, the Communicator Hub IM service will enable the delivery of content and applications to this community efficiently and in real-time. While Communicator Inc's initial target is the financial community, the same basic principle of community can be applied to other major industries."

Communicator Hub IM can be used either as a stand-alone application or in a Web browser. It has all the standard IM features, but with several key advantages over other IM services, including unified identity management, controlled access to content and applications, interoperability of corporate directories, and the ability to comply with audit and regulatory requirements. Communicator Hub IM also guarantees message delivery and operates without requiring network or firewall changes.

Availability and Pricing
Communicator Hub IM is an end-to-end secure messaging service, including operations, identity management and customer support. Pricing begins at $50 per user, per year. Communicator Hub IM is generally available as of April 8, 2002. For more information contact Communicator Inc at (914) 872-2810, sales@communicatorinc.com, or www.communicatorinc.com/hubim.