Process-one Blogs

Getting back on Jabber Inc acquisition

2008-10-02T14:24:00Z

Cisco’s acquisition of Jabber stands to be a significant boost for the enterprise IM (instant messaging) market and a clear sign of Cisco’s aspirations in the applications space. Cisco will now be able to extend the reach of its current IM service and expand the capabilities of its collaboration platform. It will also impact the Instant Messaging market deeply.

As we previously said, this move represents a major victory for open protocols, and more specifically for XMPP against the SIP/SIMPLE protocol in the battle for IM standards. Some have seen another sign that ‘open source’ had gone mainstream, but in this case it is much more a recognition of the value of ‘open standards’.

As several articles have stated (like for example Cisco Acquires Jabber (The Company, Not The Standard)), the acquisition of Jabber is a handy addition to Cisco's growing portfolio of enterprise-focused web communications products. It should be noted that Cisco is acquiring Jabber the company not the actual standard. Jabber is a big proponent of the XMPP protocol and already builds and supports a number of IM products based on the standard, however in essence Cisco is likely buying the expertise rather than specific products.

Others have highlighted that the move has instantly increased the acceptance of IM as there will be increased interoperability with established IM platforms from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! (For example Cisco guns for Google, Microsoft with Jabber buy). With more businesses realising that IM is becoming an important communications tool the Cisco acquisition opens up a lot of opportunities in the market.

ProcessOne is one of the few remaining independent IM and XMPP technology providers. As Cisco will now be actively working with and promoting open IM standards to customers worldwide, ProcessOne’s offering to telco, web and enterprise customers stands to be significantly strengthened, as they will seek greater interoperability and security across IM platforms. This opens up a new exciting era for us

You can get more details on the acquisition at http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/corp_091908.html.

Acquisition Fever in Instant Messaging Field: Nokia buys OZ Communications

2008-10-01T15:47:00Z

Nokia today announced that the Finish company will acquire OZ communications, a Canadian IM mobile client and gateway provider.

Nokia buying OZ Communications a few days after Jabber Inc acquisition by Cisco is a sign that instant messaging battle is reaching an unprecedented level, especially among telco players.

The goal of the two operations is obviously different. Cisco wants to boost its unified communication platform. It is a move to take a bigger share of the Enterprise Instant Messaging market.

Nokia is not targetting the corporate market but indirectly the end user market through mobile instant messaging. Nokia is thus becoming a player that can act as intermediary for access to large instant messaging network on mobile (for example MSN, AOL, Yahoo!). The Finish company thus become a major player between mobile carrier (and thus users) and instant messaging networks.

This is an interesting operation, as Nokia now has a strategic position and can use this situation as an advantage to promote its own mobile service platform called OVI.

The news has been covered by ZDNET Uk: Nokia boosts comms platform with Oz purchase

Rich presence support on the XMPP network

2008-09-30T07:56:00Z

Publish and Subscribe and Personal Eventing (PEP) are major features of XMPP enabling a more richer presence. What is the part of the XMPP network currently supporting this feature? Is this yet a largely deployed featured?

Our research has focused on the server side: Over all the known XMPP domains, how many are known to support Publish and Subscribe? How many are supporting Personal Eventing?

We based our calculation on the current number of known XMPP domains. Support for PEP or Pubsub is assumed if advertised by the server. If the server does not advertise it, we cannot know it is supporting Pubsub or PEP so our calculation can slightly underestimate the Pubsub or PEP deployments.

That said, here are the figures for a total of 8258 known servers:

Domains with Pubsub deployed: 2459 (about 30%)
Domains with Personal Eventing deployed: 2114 (about 26%)

So, the conclusion is that Pubsub and PEP are available on many servers yet. We should still do much better and using Pubsub and PEP extensible features in ejabberd to build applications will hopefully accelerate deployment and use.

And you? Are you supporting pubsub and PEP yet? Do you have any plan to support Pubsub and PEP soon? If not what prevents you from deploying it?

XMPP getting high profile: Cisco Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Jabber Inc

2008-09-19T12:53:00Z

The news is official now: Cisco today announced its intent to acquire privately held Jabber, Inc.

This is a major step in the spread of the open and standard XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) protocol. With Cisco, it's another major player who decided to invest on the future of instant messaging. This is also a major event in the battle between XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE for the domination of open instant messaging standards: CISCO used to have its own instant messaging platform build on the SIP/SIMPLE protocol.

This is good news for all XMPP server developers and for other independant XMPP server providers.

The full news can be read on Cisco web site: Cisco Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Jabber

Remember that 'Jabber' is a set of standard and free protocols (XMPP published by IETF, and XEPs published by XSF). This announcement about Cisco are related to 'Jabber, Inc.', a private company based in Denver (USA) that develops Jabber XCP, a closed source implementation of XMPP.

EQO study: Global Instant Messaging Market Share

2008-09-02T07:28:00Z

The mobile instant messaging developer EQO gathered data on the number of connections per instant messaging network through their client. The result has been summarized in a global map of instant messaging networks usage in the world.

The figures are not complete and they only compare relative usages of people using the EQO mobile client. However, it gives a good relative comparison of the instant messaging networks use.

Please, note that Jabber and Gtalk can actually be counted as a single XMPP instant messaging network. In Switzerland and South Africa for example, the XMPP network is close to be the leading instant messaging network.

The full article is available on EQO blog: Global Instant Messaging Market Share - July 2008.

ejabberd 2.0.2

2008-08-29T16:44:00Z

ejabberd 2.0.2 is now ready for download.

This version is a maintenance release containing 49 bugfixes and improvements. You can read the Release notes for more details.

The new code can be downloaded from ejabberd download page.

This release follows the ejabberd 2.0.1 beta release launched in july 2008. Thank you all for your feedback !

Instant Messaging as a social research tool: Study revives six degrees theory

2008-08-25T07:43:00Z

According to a recent study by Microsoft into instant messaging habits it takes only six steps to link everyone together.

The research carried out by Microsoft researchers Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec studied 30 billion instant messages sent using Microsoft Messenger during June 2006 and found that any two people were linked by seven or fewer acquaintances.

As reported by BBC News, Horvitz says "What we are seeing suggests that there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity."

This research is further evidence of the social and collaborative benefits instant messaging can offer both in and outside of the enterprise through linking more and more people together.

You can get more details on the article from BBC News: Study revives six degrees theory.

ProcessOne at XMPP summit

2008-07-18T08:28:00Z

ProcessOne will be at the XMPP summit from 20th to 22th of july 2008.

We are eager to meet XMPP servers and clients developers, but also our users around Portland.

If you would like us to meet and will not be at the XMPP summit itself, please drop me a mail

Usage estimation of public XMPP servers per domain

2008-07-18T07:53:00Z

Based on data gathered by our IMtrends search engine, here is our very first "market shares" estimation on XMPP servers, for domains known by IMtrends.

Please, first note that study relies on a panel of 7292 XMPP domains as discovered by the IMtrends engine. This should be still only a partial analysis of the existing XMPP servers: we cannot take into account totally private servers. However, we have received feedback that a lot of the known XMPP public deployments are already gathered in the IMtrends database. You can check by yourself on our search engine and add more public servers in the database that we could be missing: See IMtrends.

Please, also note that those statistics do not take into account the size of the domains (the number of total users and simultaneous users peak).

Now, let's get to the data. Here is a breakdown on server usage per type on the 18 july 2008:

Software Family	Market Share
ejabberd	37.0%
jabberd14	22.4%
openfire	18.4%
jabberd2	11.3%
Google XMPP	6.2%
wpjabber	0.9%
XCP	0.2%
djabberd	0.1%
SoapBox	0.1%
psyc	0.1%
Isode M-Link	0.1%
tigase	0.1%
timp	0.1%
JCS	0.0%
MOO-XMPP	0.0%
Unknown*	3.0%

We will publish more statistics analysis in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Yahoo! in favor of open instant messaging standard XMPP

2008-07-08T15:30:00Z

After its experiments on XMPP, Yahoo! now admits that instant messaging interoperability is needed and that XMPP is the most likely protocol to support federation of instant messaging platforms.

Yahoo's new head of communications products Scott Dietzen recently gave an interview to CNET. Scott comes from Zimbra, a communication company that use XMPP in its communication. Now that Zimbra has been acquired by Yahoo!, the believe of XMPP as the best candidate for instant messaging protocol has spread.

As reported by CNET, Dietzen said in an interview: "I believe XMPP is the right platform through which to deliver interoperability with at least some of our partners."

When asked about SIP / SIMPLE protocol, he adds: "There are two competing potential standards, XMPP and...SIP. If I were betting, I'd bet on XMPP emerging as the likely framework for adoption."

This interview confirms that things are moving in the XMPP direction at Yahoo!, as previously reported.

You can get more details on CNET article: Yahoo's encouraging words for IM standards

IDC: Instant messaging to overtake email in business

2008-07-07T10:09:00Z

According to IDC, instant messaging is set to overtake email as the preferred form of business communication by the second half of 2010.

The research shows that what they call the Hyper-connected have already adopted instant messaging as their primary channel for communication and will be driving instant messaging in the corporate world to the mass effect.

This trend will place instant messaging at the heart of the enterprise communication channels. You can thus expect the focus of the leading instant messaging platform to become security, compliance, robustness and ability to federate with the external world.

A good coverage of IDC research is available from Computerworld UK: IM to overtake email in business claims IDC.

ejabberd and XMPP client compliance

2008-07-04T09:32:00Z

People often ask us if our server works well with this client or this other one. Actually, we are not aware of any problem with major XMPP clients, but here is a more complete answer.

We needed to provide facts to our users and customers asking about ejabberd compliance level with major clients. Here is what we did. We took the 12 most popular XMPP / Jabber clients and looked at what messaging server they were using to run their instant messaging server. Here is the result:

Client	IM Domain	XMPP server used
Adium	adiumx.com	ejabberd
Coccinella	No IM domain
Gajim	gajim.org	ejabberd
jabbim.cz	jabbim.cz	ejabberd
JWChat	jwchat.org	ejabberd
Miranda	miranda-im.com	ejabberd
OneTeam	oneteam.im	ejabberd
Pandion	pandion.be	Google XMPP
Pidgin	pidgin.im	ejabberd
Psi	psi-im.org	ejabberd
Spark	jivesoftware.com	openfire
Tkabber	jabber.ru	ejabberd

Note: Yes, OneTeam is listed here because it is major for us.

You can check those values with IMtrends.

Do not get me wrong. In XMPP there is very little compliance problem between clients and servers and Interop is taken very seriously. What the previous table shows is that ejabberd is very well tested with most clients as it is the primary server for most of the client developers. If you are looking for a server that works well with a large set of clients, ejabberd is thus a safe choice. Again, I am not saying it is your only choice: both clients and servers developers are carefully testing their platform and you can get very good result as well with other combinations.

We are serious about making sure that the experience is good with ejabberd and a large majority of clients. To make sure however that client compliance, we have created a dedicated category in our ejabberd ticket tracker to report client related compliance problem or feature requests. And for client developers who do not use ejabberd as their main IM platform, we would be glad to provide interop testing accounts (drop me a mail).

A set of new ejabberd modules

2008-07-03T07:40:00Z

Several interesting technical ejabberd modules have been released lately: Rest module, Atom pubsub bridge, XMPP/AMQP gateway

Here is a short description of this new modules:

mod_rest: This module has been developed by Nolan Eakins. This is an ejabberd module that adds an HTTP handler that allows HTTP clients to literally post arbitrary message stanzas to ejabberd. The original annoucement is here. The code is now available in ejabberd-modules subversion repository.
Atom Pubsub bridge: This module have been developed by Eric Cestari. It allows any AtomPub clients to post to a specific node in your PubSub tree. The reverse is also possible: the ejabberd PubSub tree will also be available as an AtomFeed. The original annoucement is here. For more information on XMPP publish and subscribe features you can read the specification: XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe. The code is now available in ejabberd-modules subversion repository.
XMPP / AMQP gateway: AMQP stands for Advanced Message Queuing Protocol. This is a message queue protocol for business messaging. The AMQP gateway allows to mix XMPP presence, federation and internet scale network, with AMQP queueing mecanism. The original annoucement about the ejabberd gateway for RabbitMQ AMQP implementation is here.

You can browse the extra ejabberd modules on ProcessOne forge.

There are currently more than 25 extensions and the list is growing. Please, contact me if you would like to get a write access to this subversion repository to add and manage your ejabberd extensions.

ProcessOne partnership programme relaunched

2008-06-26T08:57:00Z

ejabberd and other ProcessOne components have become a strategic element in many customers infrastructure. We have recently relaunched our partner programme to organise tighter collaboration around ProcessOne solutions between the company and a group of leading customers.

ProcessOne partnership programme is good news for companies that are using ejabberd and would like to put it at the core of their infrastructure. It gives them a visibility on the roadmap, strengthen the existing ejabberd open source community, extend it to the corporate world and facilitate the continued development of this advanced instant messaging platform. It shows the commitment of a fastly increasing community of users to build the world reference XMPP messaging platform.

The programme gathers two companies deeply involved in instant messaging (Portugal Telecom and Meetic) and we are currently discussing with several other customers so that they can join the programme. You can expect more announcements soon.

To read the details of the original annoucement: New partnership programme strengthens ProcessOne instant messaging solutions

I would be happy to talk with possibly interested companies

Talk at Erlang Exchange Conference, London, UK on June 27th

2008-06-25T14:44:00Z

I will be talking in a London conference about ejabberd XMPP application server and Tsung benchmarking (HTTP and XMPP).

I will be at Erlang Exchange next friday (27th June, 2008), to talk about:

ejabberd for web 2.0 development: We have designed ejabberd as an XMPP application server that happens to be ideal to build web 2.0 applications and social networks. The talk will rely on two majors use cases: building a large scale community chat system (Major League of Baseball) and building a Twitter-like microblogging platform on top of ejabberd.
Tsung tutorial: This Tsung tutorial will present the fundamental concepts underlying Tsung architecture and will provide the required knowledge to write relevant benchmark scenarios. You will then learn how to create a scenario to benchmark an example web application and how to analyse the results of the benchmark.

I would be very glad to meet existing or future ejabberd and Tsung users next friday

More details: My talks and the conference programme.