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A casual stroll through an office building will often reveal employees surfing the Web, checking personal e-mails or managing personal online businesses.

Such activity is a mismanagement of valuable work time and reduces productivity, according to eTelemetry of Annapolis.

"As we started to talk to the marketplace, we realized there was a need to understand employee productivity and we wanted to give the enterprise the chance to document where people go [online]," said president and CEO Ermis Sfakiyanudis.

The privately held company, which doesn't disclose revenues, provides employers with hardware that is created to lower costs, increase productivity, identify internal risk and improve network efficiency by monitoring employees' computer activity. Sfakiyanudis believes that not only are employees an organization's most important asset, they can also be a great liability.

"The world is clearly moving toward a converged network," Sfakiyanudis said. "All traffic, including voice over [Internet Protocols], video streaming and video conferences and huge data transferring are moving on the same network pipe. We have this network and everything is running on it and it is our job to see how things are being used or misused so that we can help businesses reallocate those resources."

Through media convergence, the coexistence of telephone, video and data communication within a single network has become a reality. And with more convergence, consumer demands have led technology developers such as eTelemetry to confront more challenges.

With applications named Metron, Locate and Notify, eTelemetry gives employers the ability to check Internet activity and network behavior by any individual or department, and to identify all endpoints on a network. The systems also give businesses the capability of mapping a person to his IP address, and enables businesses in the hospitality arena to increase their revenue with existing Internet bandwidth.

For example, the Metron SE server, which sells for almost $3,000, enables small to medium-sized businesses to "increase productivity and enforce network use policies by monitoring and reporting on bandwidth usage, and time spent surfing and chatting by person and department," according to eTelemetry information.

"Our customers tell us that sometimes all they have to do is just let everybody know that the box is about to be installed and behaviors immediately change. We see an increase in productivity right away," Sfakiyanudis said.

The subsequent savings, he said, can quickly offset the cost of the systems, which can cost up to $15,000 for large employers, according to eTelemetry information.

The company was launched in 2004 when two civil engineers, Sfakiyanudis and co-founder and chief technology officer Alan Schunemann, were trying to figure out a way to alleviate network problems.

Sfakiyanudis, originally from Annapolis, said he always knew he would work in engineering. Two years after graduating from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1991, he founded Sigma Engineering and was its president. Sigma gave him the chance to create new business relationships and soon he was meeting with Schunemann to discuss future endeavors.

The get-togethers started off as merely chats but developed further as the two realized how they could better help businesspeople sitting behind their personal computers.

"We realized that if we could tap into the network, it would be the same as putting our finger on the pulse of the business," said Sfakiyanudis, 39. He developed Locate as a part of eTelemetry's vision. The technology, which adds identity to IP addresses, was the force behind eTelemetry's other products.

Sfakiyanudis said employees often conduct personal business at their jobs, ultimately resulting in a loss of money. The difference between going online at home and online at work is the amount of data that is transferred per second and because people at work must share the network with other employees, network congestion and slower efficiency can result.

"It is a waste of time if employees are streaming videos during the day. Going on eBay all day is not illegal, but it wastes time from a corporate standpoint," Sfakiyanudis said.

Consumers of eTelemetry

In addition to businesses, governments in Maryland and the Washington metropolitan region have sought answers to their network problems with eTelemetry's products. For example, 3,000 people use Howard County's computer network, according to an eTelemetry case study.

Some of those users engaged in streaming music or inappropriate Web surfing and were hindering employees' use of the Internet for legitimate purposes. County officials used Locate to identify people and their devices and used Metron to discern those who were conducting inappropriate activity, ultimately saving the IT department more than $10,000.

Over the last four years, eTelemetry has helped businesses in several different sectors and Sfakiyanudis thinks that even with a bad economy, its services are always going to be in demand.

"Everyone is struggling because people don't always have the money to make the purchases, but our company has done a good job in showing the value and return on investment," Sfakiyanudis said.

Tony Davis, manager of network services and technology officer for Potomac Hospital in Woodbridge, Va., was one of the first to try Locate and said the product saves him five to 10 hours a week in looking for internal hazards and locating IP addresses. Overall, he calculated 150 percent return on investment.

"It saves a lot of time from me chasing down problems," Davis said. "Within the first six months, it paid for itself. You don't see a whole lot of hospitals using Locate because they don't know what it really is. But I think that once you put it in the hands of a network manager, it will be hard to pry it out of his hands."

That's what happened to Davis when eTelemetry representatives walked into his hospital in 2005 to install a demonstration box. Initially, Davis was not too keen about the product but said that once he made a few suggestions to eTelemetry, its representatives returned with an improved system that sold him.

"It ended up being something I use extensively," he said.

Variety of partners

Over the last year, eTelemetry has partnered with other businesses to increase sales of Locate and Metron, usually sold in a bundle. Conveyant Systems, a Santa Ana, Calif., supplier of PC-based operator consoles for VoIP and other applications, and Zencos Consulting of Cary, N.C., a provider of business intelligence services, have teamed up with eTelemetry. The partners add leverage to eTelemetry products as well as their own, Sfakiyanudis said.

Conveyant Systems has used eTelemetry's product to create a product called Locate911. According to Conveyant president Tim Kenyon, the partnership with eTelemetry was a strategic move because of the importance of 911 calling systems in many hard-to-reach parts of the country. Kenyon said 16 states are studying legislation to ensure businesses are applying technology that can make it easier to locate people and reduce injury and save lives in emergency situations.

Zencos Consulting provides social network analysis to businesses. Its CEO, David Septoff, said of its partnership with eTelemetry: "We're looking at ways to help others based on their technology. We show them the data that we collect and from there we figure out how we can use it to drive more business."