Sametime Cuts Federation Deal with Yahoo, AIM and Google

The announcement that IBM will federate with AOL, Google and eventually Yahoo! further positions IBM as the only viable ecosystem competitor to Microsoft. Other vendors need to pick their partners soon because the music is going to stop and there are not going to be enough chairs for everyone.

This is a shrew move by IBM. IBM positions itself as more "open" by supporting XMPP, a protocol that is popular/entrenched in the consumer space with some vertical use within certain enterprise sectors (government, financial services). It also signals that there are no technical barriers for similar XMPP interoperability issues within intranets as well. So IBM can sit in both the SIP/SIMPLE world and XMPP world as business needs require. The news also points out a cost advantage since the gateway is included within the Sametime licensing (no extra "tax" for a gateway to the outside world). This will put pressure (and rightly so) on Microsoft its pricing model

So why no deal with Microsoft re: Windows Live/MSN, etc? Well, according to IBM, it's neither technical or political. I'll agree entirely that there is no technical reason but I do chuckle a bit that there are no politics afoot. This is somewhat childish actually, on both sides. Microsoft can federate with Yahoo! and so soon will IBM ... both are claiming that the interoperability is SIP/SIMPLE based ... (moment taken to hit head against near-bye wall) ... hopefully customers will make this happen as a due course of letting the vendors know that they need to support their business requirements and play nice together.

That said, support for rival Microsoft's instant messaging platform is noticeably absent. When asked if the lack of connectivity to Microsoft's MSN Messenger service was a technical or political hurdle, Saeedi stated that it was neither.

"These aren't technical issues or political," Saeedi said. "These are simply business agreements that we've put together with other vendors. We currently have agreements that connect us to the majority of IM users worldwide."

Source: Sametime Cuts Federation Deal with Yahoo, AIM and Google

Comments

[Jean-Louis Seguineau]

Excellent summary!

One point though. In the LCS to public IM federation model, it is the incumbent IM services (i.e every service except Google which uses XMPP) that impose a levy for connectivity to their user community. Microsoft just re-charges this toll onto any customer whishing to federate. To my knowledge this is not a “technical issue” either, as LCS itself can federate directly. In this context why are you saying that IBM has a cost advantage?

Do you mean to say that IBM was able to withhold the incumbent IM services “tax”? I personally doubt it, as for “security” reasons, gateway to these incumbent services are heavily guarded, and you have to go through a thorough registration process if you want to be put on their “white list” and allowed to connect your own gateway.

Once again, well done.

Jean-Louis