Thursday, September 25, 2008

Cisco buys Jabber – The future of XMPP looks bright….

Last week Cisco bought Jabber, the maker of Instant Messaging products and the company behind the XMPP standard for Instant Messaging. The XMPP standard has already gained a lot of traction – it's the technology behind Google talk and many chat servers including Openfire, ejabberd and more.

Cisco will be integrating Jabber technology into all its unified communications products and making XMPP the de facto standard for CISCO products. Cisco is a pretty nice name to have on your list of 'Allies' and this is a tremendous shot in the arm for the XMPP standard and for Internet Messaging in general.

Internet Messaging needs a strong, ubiquitous open standard and it looks like XMPP is going to prevail. Is the death bell ringing for proprietary internet messaging servers such as Office Communications Server (OCS)...?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Nick! May be I am mistaken, but OCS is also built on open SIP standard with some Microsoft's extensions. Also if we using 3CX, it better to use SIP also for chat, but not Jabber.

Nick Galea said...

Hi Igor,

No, Microsoft OCS is pretty much proprietary. Yes it claims to be open but you need special phones, they require special microsoft codecs and the list goes on. Their chat is not built on SIP but on a proprietary protocol. Yes, SIP can be used for chat, however i believe XMPP is more widely adopted and can easily be integrated with 3CX....