Everybody knows ExpertCity's GoToMyPC. Download a client to your office computer, and then access the machine and all its resources remotely from any Web browser. So easy to use, employees signed up for the service by the tens of thousands - often without the knowledge or consent of network managers. Even after IT departments started blocking the GoToMyPC site, users could ping it to gain access. Blocking Internet Control Messaging Protocol traffic was the only way to shut users down.

What you might not know is that Expert City's intent has always been to win over big corporations. But when the start-up launched GoToMyPC five years ago, it didn't have the resources to sell to them. So instead it relied on individual employees to push the product into their firms directly. ExpertCity launched GoToMyPC Corporate just months after the Personal version, which provides user management features as well as the ability to block access to the personal version.

Today, GoToMyPC Corporate 4.0 uses Advanced Encryption Standard and integrates with two-factor authentication schemes such as SecurID. While it's slowly winning acceptance - mainly in small companies with limited IT support or in workgroups with specialized remote access needs - it's far from becoming IT's product of choice. ExpertCity's biggest GoToMyPC Corporate account is for 2,000 users with the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services.

"Historically GoToMyPC's value has been to bypass the security guy. That damaged ExpertCity's reputation with corporate clients," says Zeus Kerravala, vice president of enterprise infrastructure at The Yankee Group. "I don't think it's warranted anymore. But people take a long time to forget, and when making buying decisions, emotion is as much of a criteria as ROI."

ExpertCity's "reverse demand" strategy paid off at firms like Jennison and Associates, a financial services company in New York. When a portfolio manager signed up for the personal version 18 months ago, Vincent D'Amico, the firm's technical services supervisor, denied the user access because the encryption level was too low.

"But the guy kept busting my chops about getting it, so when Version 2.0 came out with higher encryption, we deployed it," D'Amico says. "We started with 20 portfolio managers, then word spread and the next thing we knew we had 100."