Messaging worlds on course to merge

Talks are under way to bridge the gap between rival IETF instant messaging protocols, paving the way for development of new collaboration technologies.

Speaking last week at an IM Planet Show panel in San Jose, Calif., representatives from the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) and SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol for IM and Presence Leveraging Extensions) standards camps said preliminary talks have begun.

“The groups plan to talk more about interoperability at the IETF meeting in November,” said Joe Hildebrand, chief architect at Jabber. Hildebrand said once interoperability work begins, the standards groups will look at combining existing IM technology and developing new technology.

Other panelists included Jonathan Rosenberg, SIP and SIMPLE co-author and CTO at dynamicsoft; and Maxime Seguineau, founder, chairman, and CEO of Antepo.

Illustrating the potential for interoperability, the nonprofit Jabber Software Foundation also announced last week the public availability of two gateways designed to extend XMPP networks to SIMPLE and Wireless Village IM implementations. The SIMPLE gateway is built for IBM’s Lotus Instant Messaging implementation of SIMPLE. Both SIMPLE and XMPP are nearing final ratification by the IETF.

IM standards development is “a big-time issue” due to the significant development and market opportunities in enterprise IM and presence technology, said Rob Batchelder, president of  Relevance.

“Big companies like Oracle, Sun, and BEA are looking at this as a critical enabler for real-time enterprise,” Batchelder said.

Uniting the factional standard efforts in IM could help spur enterprise adoption of the technology, and possibly propel the major public networks, namely AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft, into action.

“Two things freezing the market for IM are dual standards tracks and the stubbornness of the major IM networks,” Batchelder said.

Although the initial talks between XMPP and SIMPLE camps stayed safely within the bounds of interoperability, the possibility of merging the efforts into a single standard would yield the most benefit to the industry, Batchelder said.

“Both [protocols] have looked at important pieces of the puzzle but not the [whole] issue,” he added.