The decision was made following a successful month-long pilot with selected users in multiple countries.

The customer, which manages close to $200bn in institutional and retail investments, is committed to the highest levels of quality in its business operations. It recognized that the speed and informality of email and instant messaging had created an environment in which external regulations and internal policies could be intentionally or unintentionally infringed, presenting the company with an unacceptable business risk.

To mitigate this risk, the company has chosen to deploy the latest version of Orchestria's APM software. Orchestria 3.0 assures compliance with regulatory and business policies through two key methods, Policy Enforcement and Intelligent Surveillance.

In Policy Enforcement mode, Orchestria detects and stops policy violations before they occur across all major communications channels including email, web, IM, BlackBerry, and Bloomberg. The asset management company will use Orchestria in this mode to ensure that staff emails, instant messages and BlackBerry communications comply with trading rules laid down by the NASD and SEC, as well as with internal policy and the terms of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

The company will use Orchestria in Intelligent Surveillance mode to apply policy after communications have been sent, in order to determine which communications have the highest likelihood of policy violation so that they can be routed to and further reviewed by a compliance officer.

The company first evaluated the Orchestria software in August 2004 and went live just three weeks later. The software is now being rolled out to the customer's global employee community by Orchestria consultants, and is expected to be fully live across the organization by February 2005.

"The speed with which this company made the decision to implement Orchestria shows the growing need for active policy management in the asset management sector," said Bo Manning, chief executive officer of Orchestria. "This company has a formidable worldwide reputation for integrity and trustworthiness and is dedicated to employing best practice in all aspects of its operations. Now with Orchestria, it can ensure that best practice in electronic communications is always observed."

The customer is the 9th major financial institution to choose Orchestria for active policy management.