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Wavecrest Computing develops internet usage monitoring tools for managers

by Anne Straub
Brevard Technical Journal

Dennis McCabe, Vice President of Business Development, left, and Chris Howard, Vice President of Engineering, at Wavecrest Computing's headquarters in Melbourne. Photo by Craig Rubadoux, © 2004.

The Internet has proven an invaluable tool for companies. It also has shown itself to be a hornet's nest of legal liability and lost productivity.

Chris Howard and Dennis McCabe saw the pitfalls - and an opportunity. When they looked at the market, few filters to block objectionable material were being sold, and no one had come up with an effective way for managers to monitor employees' Internet use.

The two launched a company to fill the gap. Almost 10 years later, Wavecrest Computing markets software that's available in 11 languages and is used by more than 3,000 organizations worldwide, including Procter & Gamble and the U.S. Justice Department.

"What it really amounts to is more knowledge for the manager," McCabe said of the company's two products. Cyfin provides customized reports on web activity, and CyBlock provides monitoring, and adds filtering to block unacceptable sites.

The company employs 12 people at its downtown Melbourne offices, where an indoor basketball game shares a room with a world map showing where Wavecrest products are used. "All our good ideas come from basketball games," said Howard, technical product manager. The University of Central Florida graduate has a degree in software engineering.

He and McCabe had to come up with their idea fast. In the mid-1990s, they were working for a Harris spinoff that installed Earth stations overseas when they began to investigate potential business ideas. A friend suggested web filtering and monitoring and led them to a software reseller. The would-be entrepreneurs created a prototype in six days, and the reseller agreed to market their product if they could deliver it within three months.

"Chris and I basically didn't sleep for six months," laughed McCabe, an electrical engineer and graduate of Florida Institute of Technology. He serves as vice president of business development.

The company's first product, released in 1996, offered what the company saw as a more complete solution to companies' web management issues. Competitors addressed the filtering side by blocking objectionable material, but Howard saw that as half the equation. "What about the other stuff?" he asked.

The other stuff includes information about employee web use. Were workers downloading pornographic images? Surfing holiday catalog sites on company time? Neglecting corporate sites set up to help them do their jobs better?

Wavecrest carved its niche by addressing those questions. "It's giving that manager the whole picture of web usage," McCabe said. The latest versions of the software improved the speed and readability of the reports provided to managers, the company said.

Cyfin and CyBlock also correct for factors that can cloud data. For example, the software counts mouse clicks, rather than sites visited, so that an employee isn't held accountable for pop-up screens or other sites that weren't intentionally sought.

Why companies are using such software:

• To avoid potential legal woes. "Companies can be held liable for the way their employees use their resources," said Mark Uncapher, senior vice president and counsel for the Information Technology Association of America. Those resources include a company computer, and that resource can be used to harass an employee by displaying pornography, to lose a family's savings on a gambling site, or to commit copyright infringement by downloading music files.

• To reduce lost productivity. Wavecrest quotes research that estimates that one in four employees spends more than an entire workday each week perusing non-work-related web sites while on the job.

• To prevent introduction of spyware. As they surf, they may inadvertently install spyware on the company computer. Spyware is software that tracks a user's activity and sends the information back to a third party, without the user's knowledge. It can slow networks, compromise security - and be prevented through a monitoring system that would reveal an unusual number of hits to a particular site.

• To track correct web usage. Companies aren't interested only in making sure employees don't spend time playing around on eBay. They want to make sure they do spend time on web sites that are geared toward corporate efficiency. Some clients use Wavecrest products to ensure employees are hitting company sites often enough to indicate that they're using the best methods for job tasks. Some workers, Wavecrest officials say, would rather use the tried-and-true telephone and fax machine rather than venture into the Internet system a company might have set up. Daily Internet reports would indicate which employees might need more training to be comfortable with a new system.