Lots of analysis on IBM’s federation announcement with AIM, Yahoo!, and Google Talk.

I especially enjoyed Mike Gotta’s supposition that IBM might be laying the foundation for “a multi-protocol presence server that could integrate with a variety of signaling interfaces. Nahhhh….”

This gets at the concept of decoupling presence from any one application, so that no application owns presence but each uses it to publish and subscribe to live data.

Mike points out here that IBM’s federation announcement (particularly as it relates to Google Talk which is XMPP-based) “signals that there are no technical barriers for similar XMPP interoperability issues within intranets as well.”

A few notes for IBM customers:

a) this is the beauty of XMPP…the federation that works for Google Talk will work with any XMPP implementation. To test an oversimplification go to Meebo.com and enter your user ID and password in the Google Talk box…If your XMPP server is accessible over the Internet, you will be able to log in. Extended to an IBM shop…deploy any XMPP service on your network and the new SameTime gateway will work.

b) Jabber, Inc. has already built a multi-protocol presence server that integrates with a variety of signaling interfaces at carrier-grade scale with military-grade security. The flexibility of XML and XMPP means that IBM shops can presence-enable new and existing network services by adding Jabber XCP™ and it will work with the existing SameTime front-end.

Interoperability means more choices and we’re thrilled to see IBM further embrace open standards.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8, 2006 at December 8, 2006 and is filed under Commentary, Jabber, Inc., Presence, XMPP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.