When Wall Street almost lost IM
p2pnet news view | Products:-Reuters, the wire service bought by Thomson Financial, has been using FaceTime code in an IM service sold to about 100 customers in the financial services industry.
Now it’s been ordered to stop, blogs CEO Kailash Ambwani.
“If Thomson Reuters were suddenly unable to make use of the Reuters Messaging compliance product, Thomson Reuters’ customers would be crippled in their day-to-day business operations…,” he quotes Eric Goldman, assistant Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, as saying.
After a six-month contract dispute and a resulting court ruling in favour of FaceTime, as of August 1, Thomson Reuters will no longer be able to, “provide its customers in the financial services sector with FaceTime technology that has provided important compliance capability in the Reuters Messaging Network since 2006,” says Ambwani, going on:
“Reuters is choosing to potentially put its customers in jeopardy of not having adequate compliance capabilities for Reuters Messaging, a communications tool hundreds of financial institutions in the world rely on.”
FaceTime customers include nine of the top 10 banks in North America, ” and most of the largest investment banks in the world,” says the blog, continuing »»»
Most of them have employees that use Reuters Messaging – typically traders whose communications are subject to strict compliance regulations. As a result of this agreement, they were able to log their Reuters messages within IMAuditor, along with messages from AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Microsoft OCS, Sametime and other popular public and enterprise networks – or they could log them directly with Reuters “in the cloud” using the Reuters Messaging Compliance Manager (RMCM).
Many customers use FaceTime’s IMAuditor to log all conversations on all IM networks – including Reuters – using our solution as a unified repository. For some, it made more sense to log Reuters Messaging with Reuters’ archiving solution. The customer had a choice.
Our agreement with Reuters expired on January 31, 2008. Shortly thereafter, we approached them to negotiate a new agreement. One of our key requirements was a technology partnership whereby Reuters would continue to allow FaceTime access to the Reuters Messaging Network to provide customers with this continued choice as they have done for years.
Reuters, “contested the language of the expired agreement,” declares Ambwani, adding:
“To protect our intellectual property, FaceTime filed suit in the Southern District Court of New York, and as Eric Goldman (Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law) mentions in his blog, won an ‘open and shut’ ruling.
How close to not working did this come? – asks Ben Worthen in the Wall Street Journal, adding:
“FaceTime makes it sound like Thomson Reuters has no chance of making the deadline and that traders would have to revert back to the phone. The claim is based on a declaration, filed to the court on July 1, in which the Thomson Reuters employee said that his company had ‘no practical immediate substitute.’
“But the bottom line is that Thomson Reuters says it has a system in place and that traders can keep sending their messages without fear. So don’t get scared. And the enduring lesson: Read software contracts carefully!”
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.Stumble It!
Kailash Ambwani – My take on today’s court ruling against Reuters, July 29, 2008
Wall Street Journal -Did Traders Almost Have to Stop Sending Instant Messages?, July 29, 2008
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July 30th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
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