IMsecure

Client

IMsecure, LLC, a California-based software company.

Challenge

Employees of about 85% of U.S. companies are reported to connect to public instant messaging (IM) services from the office. On the downside, insufficient security offered by IM providers poses a threat of virus infection, intellectual property interception, impersonation, and message tampering. IMsecure came up with a new idea for a security solution for major IM services like MSN, AOL, and Yahoo. However, the company faced huge costs of development and a shortage of qualified programming resources that were necessary to implement the idea. To solve the problem, IMsecure turned to Intetics to assemble a dedicated development team at Intetics Offshore Development Center.

Solution

The dedicated development team started as a small group of information security experts selected by IMsecure with Intetics' assistance. The team conducted a thorough research of conventional IM security tools. Most tools proved to be program- and even version-dependent, which justified the encryption-per-protocol approach worked out by IMsecure. The new software was supposed to function on the protocol level and, as a result, it was not going to be bound to specific IM programs or their versions. During a year, the development went through incremental research, prototyping, and implementations to resolve numerous engineering problems and challenges, and IMsecure with the help of its offshore dedicated team delivered to the market a unique security product to fully protect IM communications. The product guarantees total privacy of communication, preventing interception of confidential information, reducing the exposure to viruses, and protecting IM users from spam.

Results

In conditions of developing a new innovative product, the offshore dedicated team proved to be the most effective organizational structure, strategically important for the success of the venture. Direct control and management of the offshore dedicated team allowed IMsecure to make the project implementation time- and cost-efficient. Since the start of the project, the team expanded from 5 to 20 specialists and, along with the in-house staff, became an integral part of the company. The knowledge and skills accumulated by the team made it possible for IMsecure to employ it for performing diverse tasks and developing more new products.