I’m just the PR guy, but I have seen the face of unified communications, and you know what? It was an expressionless email and it told me everything I need to know: PEOPLE DON’T CARE.

The email was from my friend Rich using his gmail account. Rich was responding to an IM I sent. I can say confidently that Rich is a reasonably average 30-something personal and professional consumer of technology. He didn’t care that I sent him an IM. All he knows is I sent him a message and he sent a note back. Rich didn’t think about what ‘mode’ either of us was in; he just wanted to say hi.

That’s the essence of unified communications for a great number of people and it turns Lily Tomlin’s AT&T send-up on its head: “we don’t care, we don’t have to,” we’re people and technology works for us.

By and large though, unified communications doesn’t just work for people (yet), which is why federation matters. Rich didn’t think, know, or care that I reached him on an XMPP channel and he replied using SMTP. For him, it was a transparent exchange of messages that just worked.

And it worked because Google embraced XMPP federation, helping both of us find and communicate with each other in the mode that made the most sense. Today that means dropping the communication to the lowest common denominator of email. In the future, Rich’s reply might route itself, based on my presence, into the mode I prefer.

But without federation, our desktops resemble old movies of businesspeople harriedly working 5 separate phones, on 5 different networks, in order to communicate with the people in their sphere. In this siloed world, Rich never would have heard from me, because he’s living in email and not checking an IM client. Companies building “unified” yet unfederated communications systems are propagating the old model. You can only communicate in their silo and they don’t care, they are the “unified” communications company.

Way back when, AT&T’s “natural monopoly” brought order by integrating many networks into one. Google recognizes that the accessibility of software and processors makes unified communications both possible and the need for a monopoly, natural or otherwise, anachronistic.

In federating, Google simply accepted the inevitable–and understood that federation creates the density of addressable identities and presence that gives unified communications an irresistible gravitational pull, which brings me back to Rich and email. For Rich, all that federation means is he can send a message to any of my electronic addresses and know his message will reach me, which is what unified communications is all about.

Scalability has always been a hallmark of Jabber XCP, in fact it was the primary reason we forked away from the jabberd open source code back in 2000 and why we have almost no code in common with that project today.

Scale, followed by extensibility, and broad interoperability were the driving forces for our largest customers back then. When we delivered the real-time messaging service for Disney’s Go network back in the day, we were tops in scalability by just about every measure. Today, scale remains a key issue for really big customers, including many carriers, which is why we just completed some heavy load and scalability testing.

When we stepped into the test center recently, we already knew we could scale, with one telecom customer having already certified Jabber XCP as capable of supporting 100,000 concurrent users on a single box. We walked out a few weeks later in awe of our server and the 1,020,000 concurrent users we have now been independently certified as being able to support across a single domain.

For this test, the baseline was 420,000 concurrent users on a single T2000. Each concurrent user was programmed to methodically exchange messages, presence, and subscription requests to simulate likely scenarios in a carrier environment. At the top end of this test we had 1.8 million registered users with an average roster size of 30 . Each concurrent user performed an action every 120 seconds for the duration of the test, resulting in more than 15,000 delivered stanzas per second…these were not stagnant accounts.

What amazed even us was that as the scale of the test increased, the efficiency of Jabber XCP also increased while CPU utilization decreased significantly. For Jabber, Inc., this furthers our hypothesis that the scale of Jabber XCP - even in a single domain - has no known limit, clearly reaffirming that when it comes to scalability, Jabber XCP is in a class by itself.

If you’re interested, I’m happy to answer publicly or privately any questions about our methodology and results, along with the specific hardware requirements necessary to achieve supreme scale using Jabber XCP.

Please post your questions here as comments to this post or email me personally at ckaes AT jabber.com.

By that, I mean we should talk. By we, I mean anyone who groks the concept of what MySQL CEO Marten Mickos described at the Web 2.0 conference as “the great database in the sky”.

In Mickos’ vision, all the world’s structured data is exposed for consumption over the Internet. There is a DNS server that knows all the SQL databases, there’s some form of clearinghouse or brokerage that manages who can see what and when, there are payment mechanisms, and a host of problems to overcome. But according to Mickos, the fulfillment of the vision allows the data to become the platform.

Micko’s discusses the requirement of a means for real-time data updates, sharing and aggregation of the world’s structured data. This point is critical. The value and relevance of this conceptual database depends on how well it can deliver on the promise of: The right data, to the right person/place/thing at the right time. Meeting this requirement sounds like a job for extremely scalable XML routers that can enable the synchronous flow of structured data. Oddly enough, that’s exactly how we describe Jabber XCP.

As part of this vision, Jabber XCP is the transport mechanism of choice for data providers and clearinghouses that want to make policy-based choices on who can access what data, when they can access it, how they access it and why in real-time.

Based upon our work in government and financial services, we’ve already done a lot of the heavy lifting around access policies for synchronous flows of structured data. Scalability is the subject of an upcoming blog post, but suffice it to say, we’re the only game in town if you’re thinking really, really big.

If you’ve read this far, we should definitely talk.

Mike Gotta’s continuation of a discussion on ‘the cost of distraction’, itself a continuing thread from here and here is very salient at Jabber, Inc.

Attention is our most valuable commodity, what we are attending to at the moment is what gets done.  There are all manner and means of distracting me from what I am doing in the hopes of getting me to do what you need or want me to do.

One argument (to which Mike poses a plausible counter) is that interruptions are killing the productivity of the interrupted.  Mike’s counter is that perhaps the interrupters are having an equal or greater increase in their own productivity as they are able to get the information they need when they need it from the interrupted.

So, while the cost equation may be in question, the trend is unmistakable: there will be more means of interruption in the future, not fewer.  The key then is how to manage those interruptions?

At Jabber, Inc. we see this as a problem of disaggregated presence and attention management (a topic that seems to be popping up more of late.)  We think the solution lies in presence models that account for a seemingly limitless number of rapidly changing variables very quickly to present me with just the information I need or want at a specific moment.

In a press briefing this week, Joe Hildebrand (CTO of Jabber, Inc.) got to talking about presence-oriented networking.  The salient item being that if you can trust the layers of security, authentication, and transport methods below the application and data, you can begin to make some very interesting policy choices that allow information to route itself based upon an individuals availability, location, organizational role, current capabilities, subscriptions, etc.

It is complicated stuff to be sure, but it is also being deployed today to help first responders and financial traders amongst others attend to the stuff that requires their immediate attention while filtering out the stuff that isn’t helpful in the moment.

“Convergence does have some merits then-mainly in cutting costs and increasing efficiency-but the hype is wide of the mark. Its chief significance is that it heralds the advent of far more vigorous competition in the telecoms industry. It will be a bloody fight for the companies involved, but the ultimate victors will be their customers, who will benefit from greater choice and lower prices.”

Such is the opinion of The Economist in a special report on the future of telecoms [subscription required], which I thought flowed nicely with an early draft of some marketing copy we’ve been kicking around that is targeted to the same senior executives the writers chide.

Proposed text reads “The convergence of voice, video, text, data, along with fixed and mobile technologies represents a leap frog opportunity for some and a potential body blow to others.”

As The Economist goes on the argue, converting all content-regardless of origin or destination-into Internet Protocol (IP) technologies makes too much sense in cost and complexity terms alone for anyone to ignore it entirely.

The other side of that equation is that the macroeconomics of convergence wreaks havoc on existing business lines. Any basic service is easily commoditized and the consequences for traditional pricing models are predictable, severe, and ultimately unavoidable.

So, the people we want to reach with our message are in unenviable positions because they know the way forward likely involves the slaying of sacred [cash] cows. Yet they have big dreams. They envision the winners as the world’s most valuable brands because they manage customers’ attention—very personally—at the customer’s own request.

Right now, our best customers are the ones who either had no sacred cow to begin with or have already resigned themselves to its impending sacrifice on the altar of creative destruction. They are investing in architectures that support services that follow identities, not devices. These same services can publish and subscribe to an aggregated model of presence that allows information to seek people; reaching them only in the context they want it to find them.

Their vision is attainable, and I don’t think there is too much hype in what the end game looks like. However, the road to convergence nirvana will be paved with ideas that were before their time, brands that lived and died on the changing habits of just a few key connectors, and probably many others.

A constant that will run through every winner will be how their services interrelate, cooperate, and compete for our attention, which to Jabber, Inc. sounds a lot like what we already do.