This is big news; for Jabber, Avaya, our customers and everyone who is interested in presence and presence-enabling applications.

Here is an example use case of the technology in this announcement: imagine that your best friend at work has one XMPP device and one SIP device, both of which are online, publishing presence. When you subscribe to her with either protocol, you will see an aggregated view of her presence, including the presence all of her devices.

This is a unique solution providing aggregated presence for SIP/SIMPLE, XMPP and other protocols. Don’t confuse presence aggregation with federation. Aggregation collects presence information within a system, where it can be processed, filtered and published. Federation allows two or more systems to publish and subscribe to each others’ presence. Presence aggregation, particularly in multi-protocol, high-scale systems, is a much harder challenge than federation. Working together, Avaya and Jabber have met this challenge.

This announcement is another example of how presence is essential for unified communications, collaboration applications and real-time services. It also is proof positive of the fact that presence is useful for much more than instant messaging. In contrast to conceptual discussions on this blog discussing the types of applications driving demand for presence software and the critical requirements of presence platforms, this announcement is concrete - a real solution for real-world, real-time applications.

Participating in this solution has been of great value to Jabber in enhancing our multi-protocol technology and organizational knowledge. SIP is well established, particularly for applications incorporating digital telephony. Use of XMPP is growing rapidly the consumer, enterprise and government markets, with new presence-enabled applications and services based on the protocol being announced/uncovered on a weekly basis (read the hot scoop on new XMPP activities and applications here).

In case it isn’t clear, the value of presence is driven by Metcalfe’s Law. As more presence-enabled nodes (people, apps, devices, etc.) are added to a network, the value of the presence information grows exponentially. As there are several presence protocols, the only credible presence servers are those that are multi-protocol. It was challenging for Jabber, Inc. to become a multi-protocol presence server, but just being a presence server that only supports one protocol doesn’t cut it anymore.

Walled gardens have been a characteristic of presence and real-time messaging since the beginning, but the time has come for these walls to come down. Presence enjoys the benefits of network effects - the more presence nodes, the more valuable presence becomes.

How can vendors speak of interoperability yet continue to force their customers into walled presence gardens? Can you imagine unified communications systems where the telephony and email services only work within the walled garden? Federated presence, based on open standards, allows users of unified communications systems to view the presence of all of those with whom they need to communicate and to publish their presence to others. The value of presence in unified communications is greatly diminished if it is restricted to a subset of those people - those who happen to be using the same UC platform.

Mike Gotta asks some excellent questions in his report from the Microsoft Unified Communications launch:

The link to presence and identity is a really important point - and to extend that into the area of social computing is another direction to consider re: social presence not just presence as it pertains to a network, device or application (refer to my earlier post “Social Presence: We Need To Push The Reset Button“.

That said - it raises some questions:

• Why does Microsoft still not federate with Google via XMPP?
• Why does Microsoft not openly state its direction on some of the IETF-related presence standards?
• Should Microsoft take its PSOM protocol (used in its web conferencing components) and treat it as an open standard (similar to XMPP)?
• Will Microsoft openly expose its granular rich presence information in a bi-directional manner to other vendors (Microsoft’s assumption is that OCS is the master presence platform but many companies will have more than one presence aggregation point)?

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Brandenburg Gate: Open this gate! Unified communications providers, tear down this wall!

Presence and real-time messaging are core themes of applications and services in unified communications and collaboration. In these user-centric worlds, applications, users, and devices must share presence, messages, and data. There is not (nor will there be) a single communications protocol that spans this diverse and growing universe of communications endpoints.

Based on the activity in our pipeline and the OEM deals we’ve signed (click for a recent example) Jabber is becoming the de facto standard for presence-enabling existing services and applications. Jabber easily bridges legacy and standard protocols to aggregate presence with speed, scale, and security. Jabber, Inc.’s technology is multi-protocol now, and it has the flexibility to extend to future protocols as they become established.

When Jabber, Inc.’s far-flung road warriors got caught by the recent snowstorms, presence was our first line of communication. Some stranded travelers wrote custom presence messages such as “stuck in Dallas, call my mobile”. Others used mobile IM to see who was available at headquarters to help them make new travel arrangements. In one case, colleagues on separate trips were able to meet up to share a rental car back home. With presence so ingrained into the Jabber, Inc. culture, no one was unaccounted for and people got help in real-time.

With the New Year, Jabber, Inc. enters its eighth year in the presence business, so it isn’t surprising that we use presence technology almost instinctively. What I find surprising is that there are so many organizations that are entirely presence-free. Sure, plenty of people are using enterprise and public IM to get their work done more efficiently, but typically, presence is only used to see if someone is available for a phone call or IM session. This situation is going to change radically in 2007.

I hereby go on the record boldly predicting that 2007 will be the Year of Presence in mainstream IT. Business decision-makers and IT professionals will realize that it is imperative to presence-enable communications and business processes, just as it was imperative to network-, then Web-enable business applications and processes in the 1990s. Be presence-enabled or be square. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The principal catalyst will likely be telephony, the technology invented 130 years ago, in the Centennial year of the United States. All forms of real-time communications benefit from presence and phone calls are the mainstream real-time communications medium. As digital telephony makes deeper inroads into the enterprise, presence will tag along and become integrated into the basic infrastructure of business.

While there will be growth in the business use of IM, that isn’t my point. The high-order bit is that from this point forward, real-time presence will be a basic information technology requirement. It all started with the dialtone. In the Web 1.0 era, Scott McNealy coined the term “big friggin’ WebTone switch” to capture the imperative of Web-enablement.

We are now entering the mainstream presence era, where aggregating and pervasively embedding presence becomes a business-critical IT mandate, just as becoming Web-enabled was back when Scott McNealy first spoke about Webtones. Jabber, Inc. has a programmable and scaleable real-time presence engine, which is an excellent foundation for the Big Friggin’ Presence Switch.

Best wishes for a happy, prosperous and presence-enabled New Year!

“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.

It’s the tagline for Jabber, Inc., but what does it mean?

To extend the filaments/bulb theme: when the light is on, people and systems can see the context of other people, systems, and things more clearly.

Yes, but that doesn’t really answer the question…

The Power of Presence is the ability to control the dimmer switch, and choose where, when, and at what to shine the bulb. The power lies with individuals and systems; each exerting some control over what they see as well as what parts of them can be seen by others.

Separately, the many strands of presence offer variable luminosity, collectively they are powerful beacons influencing what information goes where, to whom, and when, why, and how it is consumed.

The value of search-driven advertising is the flicker of a distant candle in comparison to the power supplied from aggregated presence. Just taking myself for instance, many different entities have access to lots of pieces of my presence. My mobile carrier knows when I’m using that device and perhaps even my location, my satellite provider knows when and what I’m watching, my bank and credit card companies know what I buy and where, certain people and services know when I’m online, search companies know what I’m looking for at a given moment, and so on. But none of them sees the entire context, which includes who I’m with, precisely what I am doing or what I would rather be doing.

But, some already know more than others. From service providers to content producers to technology providers to organizational consumers of content, there is a race on to illuminate as much context as possible.

The drive by telcos to offer triple and quadruple-play services to consumers is at a very deep level about presence and context, and not simply about average revenue per user (ARPU).

If my quadruple-play vendor knows what I am watching, when I am watching it, and knows (because I told them) that I don’t want to be interrupted during that show, they can prevent most electronic interruptions (alas, they cannot control the person sitting next to me). Moreover, if they could aggregate - with my permission - things on my calendar, they could do really useful things, such as sending a coupon for “dinner, Saturday night.” But, and it’s a huge BUT, my service provider knows nothing of what kind of food I like, what neighborhoods I prefer, etc., not to mention those of my companion(s). Some of that information can be mined, the trick is in getting me to trust any one company with enough information so they can extrapolate and make recommendations without annoying me or otherwise violating the trust I have granted them.

In the more controlled environments of an enterprise, using presence to route information in the right context is already an achievable end. But is it possible in the consumer space (i.e., do you think you could trust any one company that much)? We can envision scenarios where clearinghouses and other trusted third parties broker information exchanges of a highly personal nature that are to the mutual benefit of individual content consumers and producers. What do you foresee?

Filament(n) [http://www.answers.com/filament]: Thin thread of carbon or tungsten which produces heat or light with the passage of current.

The universal symbol for the Jabber protocol is a light bulb. Jabber.org and Jabber, Inc. use stylized versions of a light bulb as logos and as icons to represent presence. We’ve named this blog “Filaments” because we will be discussing topics at the core of presence.

This is the first entry of an open conversation about any and all of the many strands of individual and system presence. Check this space regularly for discussions on how presence is and can be embedded within applications, devices, and systems as thin strands of information that together weave a richer and more real-time experience.

Please join the discussion.