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Press Release
Mexico's Largest Convenience Store Chain FEMSA Selects FaceTime for IM Security and Compliance
FaceTime's Successful Channel Program Enables Convenience Store Chain to Comply with U.S. Government Regulations
FOSTER CITY, CALIF - June 1, 2005 - FaceTime Communications, the leading provider of solutions that secure the uncontrolled use of instant messaging (IM), peer-to-peer (P2P) and spyware applications, today announced it has delivered its market-leading IMAuditor™ IM security and control solution to FEMSA Comercio, the owner of OXXO, Mexico's largest convenient store chain. OXXO is the subsidiary of the FEMSA corporation, the largest beverage company in Latin America. Secured through FaceTime's exclusive partnership with Migesa, the transaction continues FaceTime's momentum in penetrating the Latin America market and demonstrates the increasing success of its channel program.
FEMSA controls nearly half of Mexico's convenient store market share through OXXO. The FEMSA subsidiary has approximately 6,000 employees and operates over 3,000 OXXO convenient stores and four distribution centers. Although FEMSA is based outside the United States, the company and its subsidiaries are under the same pressure to adhere to compliance regulations from Sarbanes-Oxley and the SEC that American companies face today. FEMSA trades on the New York Stock Exchange through American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), which are certificates issued by a U.S.-based bank that enable non-U.S. Corporations to trade on U.S. exchanges.
More than 250 employees in dozens of FEMSA branch offices use the publicly available MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger IM applications to communicate with each other, sales persons and service providers in real-time. The company recognized that unrecorded and unmonitored IM communications could leave them vulnerable to legal risks if the company's records were subpoenaed in a lawsuit, audit or similar investigation.
"We've found IM to be a very helpful communications tool, but as we started to open its use on the company, our network service level started to suffer, and became very unpredictable," said Ruben D. Treviño, CIO at FEMSA Comercio.
In addition to recording these conversations for compliance purposes, the company wanted to fully control user-behavior to block unnecessary or unproductive chatting, without preventing parties that actually needed the real-time interaction of IM for their day-to-day work activities. After evaluating several solutions, FEMSA determined that FaceTime's IMAuditor's message archiving and auditing capabilities best met their stringent compliance and security needs.
"We faced the decision of scaling back on IM's use, or to get a better control of it, and we selected FaceTime's solution as being the most comprehensive tool for this kind of resource administration," Treviño said. "Our first results tell us that we'll be able to provide this innovative service, without compromising our mission critical resources."
"Companies in Latin America are realizing that IM communication is occurring within their networks whether they like it or not," said Guillermo Dow, Commercial Vice President at Migesa. "We expect this transaction with FEMSA to be the first of many sales of FaceTime's IM management solutions in this region."
With its industry-unique 'True Compliance' functionality, IMAuditor is the only IM management solution that captures messages in binary form - e.g. bolded words, flashing text, etc. - rather than storing them in plain text, illustrating the true context of each message. It is also the only product that includes an anti-tampering capability for all stored IM messages.
"FEMSA Comercio's purchase of IMAuditor demonstrates the demand FaceTime is seeing all over the world for secure, regulatory compliant IM," said Christopher S. Dean, Senior Vice President of Business Development at FaceTime. "Many international companies must adhere to a myriad of industry and government regulations, including those set by U.S. regulating agencies. It's a daunting task but one that FaceTime has been helping customers accomplish longer and better than anyone else."
About FEMSA Comercio
FEMSA is an integrated drink company with greater sales in Latin America. Their main businesses units are: Coca-Cola FEMSA, the distributor of greater Coca-Cola products in the region; FEMSA Beer, the second largest brewing company in Mexico and an important exporter of beer to the United States and other countries around the world; and OXXO handling more than 3,400 establishments at the national level.
About FaceTime Communications
FaceTime Communications enables the safe and productive use of instant
messaging, Web usage and Unified Communications platforms. Ranked number one by
IDC for four consecutive years, FaceTime's award-winning solutions are used by
more than 900 customers – including nine of the 10 largest U.S. banks – for
security, management and compliance of real-time communications. FaceTime
supports or has strategic partnerships with all leading public and enterprise
IM network providers, including AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Skype, IBM and Jabber.
FaceTime is headquartered in Belmont, California. For more information visit
http://www.facetime.com or call 888-349-FACE.
The FaceForward blog, at http://blog.facetime.com,
offers thoughts and opinions about the changing nature of Internet communications.
PR Contact:
Joshua Barnes
A&R Edelman
650-762-2865
joshua.barnes@ar-edelman.com
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