I had a briefing with the founder and CEO of Massachusetts startup DexRex, Derek Lyman earlier this month and discussed the company’s upcoming announcement of ChatSync Mobile Enterprise for BlackBerry. Founded in 2006 by Derek and Richard Tortora, two University of Massachusetts Computer Science students, the company has steadily grown to engage with 70+ enterprise customers.
The ChatSync product and service involves a software agent that plugs into your PC or mobile device and securely forwards copies of specific classes of traffic – Instant Messaging and SMS – to and from the device to a managed store available as an enterprise service or as a hosted managed service. The unique design of the DexRex approach is to implement the function as a component of leading managed email service solutions such as USA.net, eSecurity, SEECAS and Sonian Networks.
For most users of mobile IM and SMS services, the client or device software generally provides some degree of persistence. In SMS services for example, even my old Nokia feature phone stored onboard my last messages. My iPhone now stores my conversations. and allows me to scroll through them.
However, for users in highly regulated industries such as financial services, mobile device persistence is not compliant nor conveniently searchable. The conversation needs to be stored in a central server (on enterprise premises or in the cloud) so that it can be processed as part of a legal discovery process. Because of that inability to make the communication method compliant, most financial services IT departments under the advice of their compliance departments have denied access to these simple and powerful services because they could not be well-tracked or integrated into the company’s communications compliance infrastructure.
Now, the ChatSync Mobile Enterprise for BlackBerry enables compliance and integration with the enterprise messaging storage and archiving policies for SMS, MMS and the popular BlackBerry Messenger service. Focusing on the BlackBerry infrastructure makes a lot of sense for DexRex because that’s where the compliance-sensitive customers are.
The DexRex solution enable higher productivity that comes from being able to use mobile IM and SMS for BlackBerry users in these highly regulated and compliance-sensitive industries.
