FACETIME PROVIDES JUST THAT

Sometimes you just need to know something right away. That “need” is what will drive presence from the familiarity of instant messaging into the realm of instant communications.

“There's nothing else like it to satisfy the real-time usage of time-sensitive communication,” said Glen Vondrick, president and CEO of FaceTime Communications. “You can communicate quickly. It's not like e-mail where you send a message and it may take a while for that person to get it or send it back to you. Just like a telephone, we're talking in real time with each other.”

FaceTime has built a communications services platform for businesses, not individuals. It started by offering a front-line call center agent capability that combined IM with a customer service call center, allowing agents to go online to get information from corporate experts to handle customer questions.

FaceTime's product also lets businesses manage a variety of disparate IM offerings from carriers like America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo where they have centralized control over how employees can use different communications methods, Vondrick said. This becomes relevant to securities traders who need to produce a trail of client transactions, he said.

“As an enterprise you can have a complete track of what communications are going on, just like you do with e-mail,” he said.

Vondrick is a big supporter of IM and its extension into a wider presence space. “It's going on more devices,” he said. “People are using it at home and at work.”