The IM Open Standards War is Over - XMPP Has Won

The IETF has been working on two families of standards for instant messaging:

1. XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), which was based on the well-known Jabber system. There is an increasing number of XMPP servers being deployed -- notably by Google -- and many product announcements.
2. SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions), which is an instant messaging specification based around SIP. Despite its name, SIMPLE is substantially more complex than XMPP and has not had the broad adoption of XMPP. The notable exception is Microsoft, which is using protocols "aligned" to SIMPLE.

Although not officially declared, the conclusion is clear: XMPP is the open standard for IM.

This item was originally posted as an 'Insight Bulletin' for Ferris Research.