XMPP - Helping Build the Real Time Web

19 June 2009

Cleartext CEO, David Banes leads the way with insights to the possibilities of XMPP in real time communication and social networking.

XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is now an industry standard consisting of core protocol stacks for clients and servers, with XMPP Extension Protocols (XEP’s) managed by the XSF. These extensions add significant functionality to the core protocol and extend the use of XMPP as an XML routing platform. They bring things like data forms, file transfer, multi-user chat and publish-subscribe mechanisms even integration with well known web technologies like SOAP http://tinyurl.com/p56eb

The mission of the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is to build an open, secure, decentralized infrastructure for real-time communication and collaboration Online.

This vision is the culmination of ten years of work starting with the Jabber chat protocol and resulting in publication of XMPP by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) in 2004. This protocol is built as an open standard using XML over IP networking ensuring use of and integration with established protocols and security technologies such as XML, SSL, S/MIME and SASL.

XMPP gives us an open decentralised infrastructure not unlike email (SMTP) in its architecture but with a structured data format (XML) rather than plain text ‘line by line’ format we’re used to in email. There are significant benefits to using XML to transport data, just look how HTML enhances plain text in email and web pages.

Enterprise IM (EIM)

EIM ( http://tinyurl.com/lswfdt ) has had a very slow adoption, not because IM isn’t a valid business tool but because people have preferred to use public IM platforms, like MSN and Yahoo! Messenger. This comes back to communities and cost. Ask an IT professional if he wants to deploy an EIM platform and you’ll get a couple of standard responses; ‘why pay for IM when we get it for free?’ and ‘there’s no point in looking at EIM unless we can allow or control access to public IM networks.’

Ask the users if they want an enterprise IM platform without their public network buddies and with archiving and content monitoring and you’ll get a resounding ‘No!’ What’s the point of EIM with no buddies outside you own domain!

This has seen companies like Microsoft (LCS/OCS) and IBM (SameTime), Jabber Inc (now part of Cisco) have reasonable success selling IM platforms and security solutions. Others with proprietary IM platforms have shut up shop or sold out, OmniPod being an example that ran until 2005 before selling out to MessageLabs, who’ve since seen little interest from prospective clients. Significantly OmniPod had gateways to public IM networks.

In the last 8-12 months Cleartext has started getting inquiries for EIM solutions, with security and archiving driving the prospective clients enquiries. It’s entirely possible that Microsoft's push with OCS(Office Communications Server) is pushing IT departments to start looking at IM seriously and that XMPP is presenting itself as a good open, secure, standards based alternative. After all, just like standards based email, IT administrators will want to ensure technology they select is interoperable with other systems.

Email started out as a mixed bag of proprietary platforms with little enterprise control over its use. IM has travelled the same path. There’s still good reason to believe that EIM will come into the fold and that enterprise budgets will start to appear for standards based, secure messaging platforms. XMPP is the obvious choice alongside the only other viable platform in SIP/SIMPLE. The proprietary IM platforms will disappear.

So it’s starting to become obvious that XMPP is moving out of the ‘old school’ IM jail that it’s struggled with for many years and is leaping right over it’s messaging counterparts into social networks. There have been discussions on the email lists run by the XSF about social network federation for a while now and some of the people on these lists are involved in some of the well known social networking platforms on the net at the moment.

Some of the new functionality is coming from discussions around PEP (Personal Eventing Protocol) as the next-generation transport for advertising things like moods, activities, geolocation, music tunes, and microblogging. There are also complementary protocols already in use and based on XML, RSS and Atom news feeds are natural companions and easily integrated into the XML routing that XMPP is.

But are you getting the message?

Organisations are getting the message, we’re getting enquiries from banks, government departments and professional services companies, my Google alert on XMPP goes off several times a day now with developers posting to blogs about the subject.

What XMPP needed was a big event and this came in September 2008 with the acquisition of Jabber Inc by Cisco. This is significant for several reasons. Cisco has been acquiring messaging related technologies for a while now and we all know that when a big technology company, like Cisco or IBM, picks up a new platform the technology suddenly has access to a large market and the technology gets an ‘it’s OK to use’ sticker that usually means it’ll take off in the enterprise.

So what does this mean for us?

There’s no doubt XMPP is heading into mainstream, it’s an IETF standard and it stands as good a chance, or better, of becoming THE standard in this technology space, unless of course something else pops out of the net and becomes trendy over night.

The challenge for companies supplying solutions in this space is how to package them up for real world business consumption without being labelled ‘Jabber chat’ and the challenge for organisations who hear about XMPP is understanding how it can be used to deliver benefits over and above those pitched at it by incumbent vendors, who have yet to buy into one of the most promising open messaging standards to arrive for many years.

I hope this article gives you some insights into the possibilities for XMPP in both real time communication and social networking. One last thing, XMPP does store and forward messaging, just like email, do we really need SMTP as well?

David Banes is Co-Founder and CEO of Cleartext

- http://www.cleartext.com/

On the Board of Directors at the XSF

- http://xmpp.org/xsf/board/

On the Board at the Internet Industry Association

- http://www.iia.net.au/

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XMPP - Helping Build the Real Time Web

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