ICON Capital Corp. is a fund manager with 16 years of experience in sponsoring equipment leasing investment programs. As the nation's 6th largest independent equipment finance/leasing company, ICON has acquired over $750 million of equipment, which it has managed in its funds for over 24,000 investors.

With offices across the country, ICON Capital is divided by location and by business function. New York City is the company's hub - which includes its financial, legal, and marketing operations. Its Boston office manages Investor Relations, while San Francisco is home to ICON Equity. ICON also communicates on a daily basis with the many dealer/brokers located across the country who represent ICON Securities.

Reliable communication and the ability to share information between offices is critical to its business success. For that reason, ICON's chief concern was a network infrastructure that was foolproof. ICON needed a secure and cost effective solution to provide fast and round-the-clock connectivity between offices, remote sites, and dealer/brokers. In addition, compliance with Securities Exchange Commission regulations required a new method of archiving messaging information, and raised security concerns.

Applied Software began with the installation of a new Microsoft Windows-based server and network system. The Windows network offered a new level of stability for ICON. "We had inherited a disastrous computing environment, said Tom Martin, Executive Vice President, ICON Capital. "The Windows-based network has been rock solid, and has made huge difference in terms of reliability." Microsoft Exchange and Office were also implemented.

The Boston, New York, and San Francisco offices are connected via a virtual private network (VPN), which, rather than a dedicated T1 line, provides the most cost effective connectivity solution. A remote sales force and broker/wholesalers were also configured to connect through the VPN. Juniper Networks firewall and VPN technology was used to secure the connections and NetIQ's MailMarshal content filtering solution was also implemented.

In order to comply with regulatory messaging retention requirements, Applied Software Technologies implemented a solution to store and archive copies of e-mail and fax; a solution from IM-age was also implemented to capture and log instant messaging (IM) traffic.

To further enhance communication between sales and dealer/brokers, as well as to improve the dissemination of information to the dealer/brokers, a windows-based CRM software solution was also implemented.