Facebook Chat and Unified Communications

A few weeks ago, I read an interesting blog post by Mike Gotta, a principle analyst for the Burton group. I’ve been mulling it over and wanted to share my thoughts – but let me give you a recap first.

 

Gotta writes about Facebook’s use of Jabber/XMPP for Facebook Chat and how he thinks this will impact enterprise organizations that are planning to roll out corporate instant messaging/presence platforms that are based in SIP/SIMPLE. Short term, Gotta does not expect Twitter’s nor Facebook’s use of XMPP to impact business decisions, but he predicts that XMPP in the near future could lay the groundwork for Unified Communications in the enterprise.

 

Gotta makes a couple of observations about IBM and Microsoft’s position in the UC market. Here is an excerpt from his post:

 

For IBM, I would expect someone from IBM’s unified communication and collaboration team to realize that this is a great marketing opportunity. At some point, I expect IBM to aggressively pursue interoperability between Facebook’s XMPP system and the Lotus Sametime Gateway. 

 

For Microsoft, this news presents them with a problem – they are in a position that is almost impossible to defend. There is absolutely no technical reason why the current Microsoft gateway does not support XMPP today. It is simply a political decision (in my opinion), by the folks at Microsoft as they compete with Google. Granted, GTalk does not have the market share of other public networks (Yahoo!, AOL), but even so, the strategy is clearly not customer-focused at all.  

Gotta makes a good point, but I’m not convinced the onus lies with the Microsoft gateway provider.  The Microsoft gateway doesn’t support XMPP… ok, so what?  You can make the case that Facebook (in which Microsoft invested $240 million) and other sites will need to add a SIP gateway to support connections from OCS.  It’s not a mandate, but one or a few sites may take the plunge and make themselves easily accessible to the millions and millions of (eventual) OCS users — the others will have to follow suit.

Or Microsoft bites the bullet and adds XMPP support to their gateway but restricts it so that can’t connect with their arch-rival Google.  That’s possible.  But again, will a company looking at OCS say “Gee, sorry I liked the solution but chose Sametime instead because it can connect to Twitter”?  Maybe that day will come, but not any time soon in my opinion.