Interoperable Enterprise Instant Messaging is Finally Here

September 22, 2009

The acquisition of Jabber, Inc. by Cisco marked the beginning of the end of proprietary, closed enterprise instant messaging platforms. For more than a decade now, most businesses have either relied on proprietary enterprise instant messaging platforms that do not enable federated communication with other businesses, or they have relied on public services like those from AOL, MSN, or Yahoo and used such nicknames as "happygirl546" to conduct business. How professional is that?

The reason we assert that this marks the end of proprietary solutions is that Cisco's acquisition of Jabber signifies the importance of the protocol Jabber had been pushing for so many years: XMPP. XMPP is the name of the protocol the IETF adopted when it standardized the Jabber protocol.

Over the years, there has been a tremendous growth and interest in XMPP. Unlike proprietary services, XMPP is an open standard that enables a person to communicate using his or her identity (referred to Jabber ID or JID) with anybody else in the world that is also using XMPP. A JID usually takes the form of an email address and is readily understood by users. Most importantly, using XMPP for instant messaging means that users have the potential to communicate with as many people as they do with email. (Oh, and if you are worried about instant messaging spam, don't be: you can control which people can send you messages or see your status.)

The IETF just initiated work on to revise the XMPP specifications, largely driven by effort on the part of those participating in the XMPP Standards Foundation. XMPP is now a very rich protocol with support for file transfer, voice and video, persistent chat rooms, and much more. In fact, at the time of this writing there are some 274 extensions to the protocol, albeit quite a few are still in the "experimental" stage. Nonetheless, the high level of activity is very encouraging.

Perhaps as further evidence that XMPP is destined to be a very important component of enterprise communication is the fact that Google announced a new product called Google Wave. Google Wave is a new communication paradigm that significantly changes the way people can interact with each other. Rather than sending text messages, one creates a "wave" and two or more users can update that wave, even revising a wave in parallel. It is not email and it is not a blog and it is not instant messaging, but it is a combination of all of these things and more. Most important is the fact that the Google Wave server is built on top of XMPP. What this means is that XMPP is now becoming a platform upon which the enterprise will enable a number of different modes of communication.

Lastly, as evidence that XMPP is moving forward and destined to be a pervasive instant messaging technology, we note that Cisco WebEx is already offering XMPP-based services via its WebEx Connect product to enable intra- and inter-enterprise collaboration.

IBM Sametime also provides support for XMPP and Google's Google Talk service employs XMPP. There are also other companies, like Cleartext, that provide businesses with XMPP services. We should also mention that there are many open source and commercial clients and servers that support XMPP.

At long last, we are seeing the light at the end of a very long tunnel.