After I wrapped-up my Fall VON panel discussion with Avaya, BT, and HP I switched gears to do an interview with VON TV. The five minute video shares some of my thoughts on the value of presence, why protocols don’t matter, and how Jabber simplifies adding presence to applications and services. Check out my early morning mug in Jabber’s “TV” debut.
As a follow-on to the discussion of the types of applications and services that are driving demand for presence platform software, let’s now turn our attention to the critical requirements for this new software category. If I’ve missed something that’s important to your existing or planned deployment of presence technology, please post a comment on this blog.
To be broadly useful, presence platforms must be scalable, highly available, extensible and able to work with other middleware and network services. It is worth noting that some of these requirements are the same or very similar to the requirements of more established types of platform middleware, particularly services at the edge of the network, such as Web servers and application servers. This is because presence platforms in commercial deployments have similar, and in some cases, greater demands placed on them by the enterprise applications, consumer-facing services, etc. that they support.
The ability to scale is critical because presence must, by definition, be a real-time service. In commercial applications, a presence server must scale to be able to route presence information between millions of network nodes. Millions of points of presence are not uncommon, even in traditional enterprise settings. When counting points of presence, consider that a single person, device or sensor can have multiple presence elements. For example, a person with a desktop computer, and both desktop and mobile telephones has three points of presence, not counting additional presence states of presence-enabled applications running on their computer. With millions of nodes with changing presence states, a presence platform must be able to handle extreme message rates. For example, in some benchmark testing designed to model consumer service use patterns, rates of over 15,000 messages per second were observed. Without a highly scalable presence platform, presence information degrades into pseudo real-time information - what presence was, not what it is. Latency in the delivery of presence information greatly reduces its value and may cause errors and oddities in presence-enabled applications.
As presence is an always-on service, presence platforms must be highly available. The presence platforms which meet availability requirements typically have built-in architectural redundancy and auto-healing features designed to gracefully recover from outages on the network or at the network node level.
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all presence model. To allow the presence platform to be tailored to specific applications and services, it must provide developers ways to access and extend its capabilities. As there are several presence protocols in general use ( e.g., SIMPLE and XMPP) support for multiple standards makes it easier for application developers to make use of a presence platform when the presence nodes speak different protocols. To maximize interoperability and prevent vendor lock-in, presence platforms should be based on truly open standards and not rely on proprietary extensions. Another important development requirement is libraries to facilitate the creation of clients and software to connect network nodes and applications with the presence platform. A diverse set of libraries, such as is listed here, represents a major advantage for a presence platform, as it allows developers to work in the language that is most appropriate for their specific objectives.
Presence platforms are not stand-alone entities. In most use cases, presence platforms must interoperate with other network software, such as directory servers and data base services. As presence is often a new service added to an existing deployment architecture, the presence platform must be able to integrate with existing network middleware. To minimize data/hosting center floorspace and management costs, presence platforms should run on the most popular server operating systems, so a customer is not required to provision new hardware and train staff on the management of a new OS.
If you have deployed a presence platform or are planning to do so, do you have other requirements?
As presence becomes integrated into many application categories, it becomes problematic to have separate presence models for each application or service. By sharing a common presence platform, applications and services can draw from a consistent, synchronized store of presence information. This common “presence pool” can be tapped to integrate applications, route communications, data and to monitor conditions in real-time. The vision of common presence platform that can be used to add presence to existing or next-generation applications is catching on. There is commentary on the topic and there are commercial presence platforms, including Jabber, Inc.’s, in the market.
The application categories where presence is valuable or essential include: Unified communications, social networks, consumer services, collaboration tools, workflow and monitoring applications. Today, most of these applications have their own, built-from-scratch presence platforms and typically can not exchange presence information with other applications.
What do you think?
Of course, here at Jabber, Inc., we’re biased towards the off-the-shelf model, but would be interested to learn why you have, or are considering writing your own presence engine from scratch.
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!
Carola Mamberto has an interesting article (subscription required) in today’s Wall Street Journal on the corporate adoption of instant messaging. Presence was highlighted in this article as a key differentiator of IM vs email, but the author put the word presence in quotation marks. When quotes are no longer used in such contexts, we’ll know presence is truly mainstream.
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) recently announced that Jabber XCP has been selected to provide instant messaging, low-bandwidth text chat, and persistent multi-user chat for personnel across the U.S. Department of Defense. Jabber XCP will be provided as part of the contract for Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) awarded to Carahsoft Technology Corp., working in partnership with Adobe Systems, Inc. Read the Jabber, Inc. press release for more details.
Yesterday at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I participated in a panel discussion entitled “Presence 2.0“. Since the panel included some of the usual suspects from various past discussions, I decided to use the 2.0-ness of the title as an excuse to share some of the things we’ve been thinking about what presence might mean in the future. In particular, that we as an industry tend to make the problem too hard. Once users have several hundred people on their contact list, their desire for tweaky rules and individual configuration options starts to wane.
One way around this is a concept I’ve started calling “EigenPresence” (it’s important enough to me that I re-branded my blog to reflect the concept). The reputation for my digital identity is made up of multiple small pieces (on/offline, geographic location, mood, etc.), which can be combined into a single presence stream. If you were to integrate this stream over time, you would have the reputation associated with my identity. To answer Alec’s question, yes, I see Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and the like as different bits that get integrated into this stream to build up my reputation.
I’ve posted my slide deck(5.6MB) from the panel, if you’d like to see them.
One of the coolest companies using the Jabber XCP platform is Me.dium, which is innovatively presence-enabling the Web. They recently announced raising $15 million in a second round of funding. I am still chuckling at how their CEO, Kimbal Musk blogged about this achievement.
Congratulations and thanks for injecting some humor into the world of presence!
If you haven’t visited Jabber, Inc.’s Website recently, stop by and check out our new look and content.
Jabber XCP has evolved into a highly scalable, multi-protocol platform for presence and real-time messaging. Enterprise instant messaging is but one of many applications of our platform. The revised Website now reflects the true breadth and depth of our business, which remains firmly founded on presence.
We’re always interested in featuring new uses of our platform. If you would like your application featured on our Website, please let me know.
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.
