What is Archipelago's corporate IM policy? It falls under the heading of our e-mail policy. Any corporate communication, whether between two people inside or outside, has to be archived or stored for regulatory reasons. So we just made it a subset of our e-mail policy, so if [you] use this, everything is being trapped and stored. That's just the rules of the game.

Who uses IM the most at Archipelago? The people who sit on our trade desks, because there's so much going on. There are so many positions and streams of data. When they have to chat with somebody, that's the easiest way to construct a chat. So they're the heaviest users. If you went around the rest of the company, I don't think you'd see a lot of IM users.

How long have you been archiving instant messages? We've been doing e-mail archiving for years, but IM archiving for six months [using software from IMlogic].

Is there a corporate IM standard at the company? You can use any IM tool you want, as long as it complies with our ability to archive it. For instance, I don't think Google Talk works with IMlogic, so Google Talk is not an approved piece of software here for IM.

Do you track which IM applications people download? Yes. I think we know what's sitting on people's desktops.