With the acquisition of Antepo, Adobe has made a deeper commitment to XMPP, joining the ranks of leading technology companies such as Apple, Google, Sun and others. IBM’s recent XMPP interoperability announcement is further evidence of the growing mainstream acceptance of the protocol. With such powerful backing, XMPP has clearly reached a tipping point, achieving recognition as the industry open standard for real-time messaging and presence.

Jabber, Inc. was the first company founded around this open standard (XMPP is also known as the Jabber protocol as it owes its origins and governance to the Jabber open source project). Jabber XCP, Jabber, Inc.’s XMPP-based messaging and presence platform, is chosen by our customers for its scalability, extensibility and multi-protocol interoperability. We recognize that messaging and presence will never be a single-protocol world, but it is nevertheless gratifying to see our native protocol gain such a significant endorsement.

Congratulations to Adobe and Antepo!

Joe Hildebrand, our CTO, recently wrapped up a column for the January edition of SIP Magazine. I won’t give away the article, but one element dealt with the fact that people and machines don’t speak the same language.

It reminded me of a trip to China not that long ago and the chuckles we got from some of the English translations on outdoor signs. We understood their meaning even as they lacked precision, and that is the point:

We knew they meant take caution around the riverbank. Conversely, a machine would have tried to gently dump itself into the river.

We were chatting the other day with an industry analyst and he started reeling off the “Web 2.0″-ish companies he’s working. We asked him about presence, and how these companies are going about making their services live.

The response was surprising and practically made us yell, Why in the world would they do that? You see, many of these companies view presence as core to their offering. Totally agree with them there.

As a core component many of these folks have gone about the business of trying to build their own presence server. The theory seems to be that “our application relies upon the ability of our users to know the presence of their buddies, and we therefore must own the presence engine.”

I beg to differ. Your service also needs a web server, and a bunch of hardware, and network connectivity, etc. Do you need to build all of those components yourself? I would argue that for many of these companies, presence is backend functionality, the application they build on top of it and how they market it should be their core focus.

At Jabber, Inc. we’ve already done the hard work with a massively scalable presence server that will interoperate with any network and just about any device. You can embed Jabber presence into just about any application and aggregate the presence from other devices and applications as well.

To illustrate the point, we recently closed a deal with a Web 2.0ish company which had been using an open source presence server (which is a nice way to get started.) But once they realized that their application and the success of their business was predicated on the ability to support millions of users, they had to go shopping and arrived at Jabber, Inc. because we’re the only store on Massively Scalable Avenue.