Disruptive Telephony

As the IM protocol wars continue with AOL, MSN/WLM, Yahoo, etc. all just now starting to actually allow interconnection between their competing IM systems, I have to confess to always having been a personal fan of Jabber and it's XMPP protocol.  Maybe it's the fact that it's got an open source side to it.  Maybe that it's XML based.  Maybe it's just that I liked that anyone could set up a server and start using it. In any event, I've always been a huge fan (and generally have Psi running with a Jabber ID of [email protected]).

So with that in mind I was pleased to see the announcement yesterday that Cisco's Unified MeetingPlace will now support Jabber clients through the Jabber XCP framework.  From what I can see of the announcement, Jabber clients will now be able to interoperate with Cisco's collaboration server.   What I'm naturally curious about is to wonder whether this is limited to Jabber's commercial Jabber Messenger product (through some means) or is XMPP support being baked into Cisco's product natively, in which case conceiveably any XMPP client could connect to the server.  There, are, naturally, many Jabber clients out there (including, interestingly, Google's GoogleTalk...).

Interesting news, in any event, and congrats to both companies.