Wall Street Journal story on IETF IM efforts

[Steve Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>]

Instant Messaging FirmsBack Different Standards
Technology Conflicts Could Hinder Interoperability of Message Systems

By DANIEL NASAW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Imagine if Microsoft Outlook users could only send e-mail to other
Outlook users, or Lotus Notes users to other Lotus Notes users.
That was what e-mail was like until the mid-1990s, when the e-mail
data protocol known as SMTP, (for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol),
came into universal use, allowing different vendors' e-mail servers
to communicate with each other.

Now, with businesses embracing instant messaging in the office,
big tech companies are taking sides in the battle to establish
similar standards for messaging. A single, dominant standard for
desktop messaging is the next step toward universal interoperability
between different messaging systems -- which can't easily communicate
with each other now. Standards will also hasten development of
futuristic applications like desktop video conferencing and
desktop-to-cellphone messaging.

While consumers are familiar with messaging systems from America
Online, Yahoo and MSN, corporations have begun to turn to
enterprise-grade systems that pack additional features such as Web
conferencing, user directories and more secure environments open
only to employees or customers.

Technical standards on the Internet are governed by the Internet
Engineering Task Force, an international community of computer
scientists and technology developers. But while the group ratifies
standards, it cannot force anyone to use them, leaving that choice
to the software firms. Two major standards, which carry the acronyms
SIP/SIMPLE (Session initiation protocol for instant messaging and
presence leveraging extensions) and XMPP (extensible messaging and
presence protocol), are waiting to be ratified by the group, and
companies are already beginning to choose between them.

Microsoft Corp.'s Real-Time Communications Server, the Redmond,
Wash., company's foray into the enterprise instant-message market
due for release in the third quarter of 2003, and Reuters Group's
Reuters Messaging, a version of that system launched in October,
both use SIP/SIMPLE. IBM's Lotus SameTime, released last fall, has
implemented SIP/SIMPLE for external communication only, and the
company says that future versions will be entirely based on that
protocol.

XMPP's primary backers are Jabber Inc. (www.jabber.com1), a Denver
developer of enterprise instant-messaging software co-owned by Webb
Interactive Services Inc., France Telecom and Intel Corp.'s Intel
Capital unit, and its nonprofit affiliate Jabber Software Foundation,
a consortium of software developers, students and Jabber Inc.
customers that developed the protocol.

H-P Backs XMPP

Hewlett-Packard Co. recently threw its weight behind XMPP by
co-developing an instant-message server for Linux and Windows with
Jabber Inc., which it distributes to its consulting clients, and
by using Jabber's instant-message system internally. Jabber's other
customers include BellSouth Corp., AT&T Corp. and Earthlink Inc.

As the two protocols work their way through the engineering task
force, supporters of both tout the benefits of their respective
favorite while deriding the opposition as inflexible and functionally
narrow.

SIP/SIMPLE, critics say, wasn't designed to handle anything more
than sending text back and forth. This means that the common features
of instant messaging like buddy lists and attachments must currently
be added using proprietary extensions to the protocol -- not helpful
for a standard because other software developers won't have unfettered
access to them.

SIP/SIMPLE for instant messaging is "just a bad idea, it's an idea
that does not have a lot of architectural integrity," says Robert
Batchelder, president of Relevance, a consulting firm in Trumbull,
Conn. "SIP/SIMPLE is much more of a pipe dream than a reality at
the moment," because it isn't yet fully functional, says Paul
Ritter, an Internet analyst with the Yankee Group in Boston.

However, one of the authors of the protocol, Jonathan Rosenberg,
chief scientist at dynamicsoft Inc. (www.dynamicsoft.com2),
Parsippany, N.J., says it isn't finished yet and shouldn't be judged
based on its current version. "There's always features to be added,
capabilities to be added," he says.

Building Block

SIP/SIMPLE's backers say that the protocol can serve as the basis
for other systems besides just messaging, meaning that a desktop
computer supporting the protocol can also have Internet-based phone
calls and video conferencing.

Ed Simnett, lead product manager of Microsoft's Real-Time Collaboration
unit, says that it chose SIP/SIMPLE because of its broad potential
in that "ecosystem" of future communications, and that Microsoft
didn't want its product to use a standard that is limited in its
functionality to instant messaging. Kevin McLellan, marketing
manager for workplace collaboration products at IBM Lotus, echoed
that reasoning: "It was important for us to have a broader architecture
than just something based on instant message."

While XMPP is fully developed to facilitate instant messaging and
other kinds of text-based communication, its critics say that it
isn't designed to easily handle those other kinds of real-time
communication, although its backers tout its flexibility.

"It's not just chat," says Dale Malik, BellSouth Internet Service's
director of communications product development, which makes Jabber's
XMPP-based instant-message system available to 2.5 million consumer
and enterprise customers.

XMPP has been implemented in various ways by a wide variety of
vendors on several different platforms through the open-source
Jabber Software Foundation, whereas implementation of SIP/SIMPLE
is more limited due to the immaturity of the protocol, XMPP supporters
say.

Michael Dang, manager of enterprise messaging of Hewlett-Packard's
H-P Services unit, which has just begun distributing Jabber software,
is attracted to the cost savings of using a system based on the
widely implemented standard. "Put it on a cheap Intel box and we
can instantly communicate," he tells his customers and suppliers.

Some people familiar with the standards race have suggested that
Microsoft chose to back SIP/SIMPLE exactly because it is so
rudimentary. By supporting a protocol that requires proprietary
extensions to support even basic instant-message functionality,
they say, Microsoft hopes to strengthen its enterprise instant-message
franchise by selling its own instant-message products.

A Microsoft spokesman says that wasn't the company's motivation
and reiterated its interest in the standard's wide potential.

Stifling Investment

Whatever the relative technical merits of the two, analysts say
that the lack of a universal standard is stifling investment in
the technology because companies don't want to spend on costly
technology that may become outdated if another standard emerges.
Thus, some firms are choosing instead to have workers use the large
widely-used public network instant-message systems -- AOL Instant
Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger -- while supplementing
them with security, auditing and logging software from companies
like FaceTime Communications, Inc. and IMLogic Inc.

Furthermore, some tech firms are hesitant to invest in the development
of new collaborative technology, like video conferencing, until a
standard emerges to carry them. "Right now there is a bit of
confusion and uncertainty on the part of vendors and application
developers because the standards issue is up in the air," says the
Yankee Group's Mr. Ritter.

Some analysts predict that SIP/SIMPLE, although widely seen as an
inferior standard, will win due to the market strength of the
companies that support it. "Most people will be moving toward
SIP/SIMPLE simply because Microsoft and IBM use them," says Michael
Osterman of Black Diamond, Wash. market research firm Osterman
Research Inc.

Mr. Ritter thinks that both standards can become widespread, although
in different arenas. While both have heavyweight support, SIP/SIMPLE's
major backers -- IBM Lotus and Microsoft -- are already entrenched
in the desktop instant-message market. XMPP's backers on the other
hand, are well positioned to corner the emerging wireless messaging
market through the development of chips and PDA-like devices.

Meanwhile, whether or not the three large public-network providers
become interoperable will be a business decision more than technical
one. They use their free instant-message services to drive traffic
to their Web sites and thus haven't developed a business model that
would allow them to make up for lost revenue associated with opening
their instant-message gates to users of other systems.

Because AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger
have such a large user base -- an estimated 275 million between
the three, according to a February report by the Yankee Group --
universal instant-message interoperability on the scale of e-mail
is probably several years away, and none of those companies has
yet publicly committed to one of the standards.

Write to Daniel Nasaw at daniel.nasaw@wsj.com3


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)