Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Cisco Buys Jabber - What Does It Mean?

Cisco has bought Jabber (another of those purchases of Open Source companies that make no sense to me - what are they really buying when the IP is public?)

What it does indicate to me is that the Presence and Instant Messaging protocol pioneered by Jabber (XMPP) is now becoming a more widely adopted standard. GoogleTalk and Avaya have been using XMPP for a while now, and Cisco has just joined the bandwagon.

My idea of a Unified Communications architecture is something that leverages SIP/SIMPLE, XMPP, HTTP and the open email protocols, rather than a vendor-proprietary stack. Microsoft and IBM have interesting stories in the UC space, but I would argue that this would be precisely the wrong time for an organisation to go with a proprietary suite of products. There's no such thing as a free pair of handcuffs.

I had drawn up this architecture diagram on UC some time ago but didn't publicise it because it seemed a bit theoretical at the time. But now it seems to be more relevant with the strengthening of XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE.

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