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Founded in 1999 as the pioneer in enterprise instant messaging (EIM), Bantu was the first company to recognize that the rapidly growing use of IM among consumers would quickly and significantly impact the business world, opening a new door to real productivity gains—as well as new security threats.

Bantu developed the first enterprise-grade instant messaging and collaboration platform which met the requirements that business and government had for security, scalability, manageability, integration and speed of deployment. Since then, Bantu has become a leading provider of secure Instant Communication technology for the government, commercial and education markets. For example, the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and other agencies already have selected Bantu as the real-time collaboration platform for their enterprise-wide knowledge management portals.

Bantu recently began deploying new technology that enables these customers to communicate securely with one another across agencies at the enterprise level. The Army, Air Force and Navy have deployed this technology, and other agencies, including IC agencies, have signaled their interest in joining shortly.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the DoD and other governmental agency recognized the critical importance of enabling faster information sharing within and across agencies. The 9/11 Commission, in fact, concluded that the nation needs a network-based information system that transcends government boundaries. The confusion associated with the responses to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita reinforced the serious need for a cross-enterprise, real-time communications platform.

Bantu is now focused on leveraging its technology to address this critical need. The Army, Air Force and Navy have begun an initiative that leverages Bantu to enable real-time interoperability and communication among their personnel and personnel at other military and government agencies. Authorized soldiers and airmen can now locate and communicate with one another regardless of their location, computing platform and service affiliation. Other agencies are now preparing to join this new government collaboration network.

Increasing the effectiveness of collaboration and decreasing the time it takes to make decisions is critically important to driving productivity as well as to facilitating rapid response to sudden emergencies. This capability enables government and others to begin to realize its goal to use technology to instantly connect the right people with the right information at the right time.

Bantu is driven by fierce dedication to our customers. We achieved early growth by delivering an integrated, secure EIM solution to large-scale customers such as the U.S. Army, Sprint and Johns Hopkins University. Since then, Bantu has become the premier provider of secure EIM to the U.S. government and a leading provider to the corporate and education markets. With 200% year-over-year growth since 2001, we project even greater gains as worldwide EIM adoption continues expanding.

We designed the Bantu Platform specifically for enterprise use, believing from the start that IM is about much more than your buddy list—it’s about enabling secure, real-time collaboration as an integrated part of every application workers use to get their job done. It’s about using IM to accelerate the pace and effectiveness of doing business. With this in mind, we built the Bantu Platform with comprehensive IM, Presence and Alerts capabilities.

And, we evolved the Bantu Platform into the industry’s most advanced enterprise-grade solution, with the security, integration, rapid deployment and reliable scalability that savvy customers demand. In fact, our U.S. Army implementation – with 1.4 million users – is the world’s largest EIM system.