BT Gets Jabber

Jabber, Inc. BT Group has selected the Jabber Extensible Communications Platform (Jabber XCP™) to provide instant messaging for BT's 21st Century Network (21CN) program. Jabber will license software to BT for consumer, government, and enterprise users worldwide. In addition, the engagement between BT and Jabber includes consulting and development services which will fully integrate the Jabber XCP platform into BT’s common capabilities network.

Integrating Jabber XCP will allow BT to extend messaging across applications and services, providing BT customers with a centralized view of message routing, one-to-one IM, group chat, offline messages, message history, file transfer, and interoperability with other messaging systems such as Yahoo!, MSN, Google, and AOL.

The 21CN program, BT Group’s ongoing network transformation project, will replace the United Kingdom’s incumbent Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) with an Internet Protocol (IP) system while facilitating additional services such as on-demand interactive television, mobile television, and mobile radio.

Microsoft OCS: Here Comes Presence

Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 has recently been released to manufacturing, so expect to hear a lot of noise from Microsoft about presence and voice, as Microsoft will be nudging and cajoling third-party software vendors to integrate presence into their applications. Microsoft also will be rearranging market share in the fragmented space as well (Cisco, Jabber and all the traditional business phone system vendors will be playing, as well as Oracle, for example)

And, oh by the way, the effort shows just how real is the danger of communications service providers becoming "dumb pipe" providers.

Consider a typical customer relationship management (CRM) application. A salesperson might be looking at a customer record, and see a list of all email communications that others on a sales team have had with a given customer. There's a problem noted, and the sales rep wants to make sure it is fixed before placing an outbound call to the customer. That means checking with another internal team member. This then entails:

1. Launching Outlook Address Book.
2. Pointing to Global Address List.
3. Double-clicking a name.
4. Finding the appropriate number.
5. Dialing on the desktop phone.

Using OCS 2007 with presence, the process is:

1. Right-click internal colleague's name directly within the CRM record.
2. Choose "Call this Person" or "Send an Instant Message to this Person."

Aside from access to the global IP network, where is the telco, cable company or other access service provider involved?