I'll keep publishing

Looking at my Google Alerts this morning I saw this one;

So after quick read at of this article on ReadWriteWeb I posted the following as a comment.I’ll declare a vested interest in XMPP first, our service Cleartext ESM (Enterprise Social Messaging) uses XMPP.

Now I’ll also say that it’s worth noting that XMPP does enterprise and internet scale and is good at bridging these through an ecosystem of components, I think this is a key benefit.

There’s a third issue with Twitter in addition to business model and latency at large scale (which I don’t believe you can solve with http polling) and that is shifting technology road map.

For anyone to build complicated enterprise and internet level apps on Twitter this needs to be solved and as the platform is evolving rapidly that’s a big ask.

For example parts of our platform rely on the fact that re-tweets and hash tags are in the message. Twitters recent news that RT’s will become part of the API is good news for short messages but bad news for solutions proxying Twitter if only because we all have to do more R&D, which equates to delays to market and increased costs.

I’m firmly believe that email succeeded because its an open, standards based, federated platform. XMPP delivers the same for IM and mirco-blogging. I think this is the real time bus you’re looking for.

A great insight from Michael Osterman on email uptime.

http://www.messagingwire.com/spv-26.aspx

News that well known URL shortening service, tr.im is closing down reinforces my last post about Twitter 3rd party apps.

A good article from Ferris here stating that enterprises need to consider security and compliance when bringing social networking into the business;

Social Networking and the Enterprise.

And a reminder my relevant articles are here;

http://www.cleartext.com/downloads/IDM_NovDec_08_XMPP.pdf
http://www.cleartext.com/downloads/IDM_MayJune_P5.pdf

I learned a while back that there are broadly three (or 5) types of client when it comes to technology;

1. Early adopters
2. Late majority
3. Laggards.

The interesting thing is that if you spot a company that fits into 1. above and you have some technology that is leading edge you should stand a good chance of getting in front of them.

There’s also a downside, or lesson to be learned when engaging a client like this. They will always be looking for the next big thing in this technology area so you’d better keep up!

To give you an example. An early leader in the managed email security market did well in the mid 2000’s signing up legal firms in Australia with one in particular being an early adopter of outsourced email filtering.

Now in 2009 this company has moved to a new up and coming second generation SaaS platform,  Webroot Email Security SaaS, the same platform Cleartext re-brands as ClearEmail.

So there are a couple of observations that I can make here;

1. An assumption that early adopters churn quickly if better tech is available may be correct
2. Selecting Webroot (then Email Systems) as the platform for ClearEmail was the correct one.

Given this industry looks at it’s peers for trends and technology ideas it’s a fair assumption that other legal firms will be taking note. This sector could once again be a rich hunting ground for eager sales executives to pitch their ‘better, faster, cheaper’ solution.

So if you’ve got experiance selling messaging security SaaS, or even first generation managed email security services into the legal sector give us a call.

Another XMPP based platform.

From TechCrunch
Exclusive: BBC leads the next wave of web experience with Hemlock.

It’s a long time since I first saw a well known anti-spam service provider pushing out a release saying “~90% of all email received was spam…”  but it still makes me laugh when I see statements like this.

The problem here is that if you’re an anti-spam company using your own client base to produce these numbers then of course they’re going to be high, otherwise your clients wouldn’t be clients!

One thing I’ve discovered when selling an anti-spam service is that many people just don’t have a spam problem, perhaps for the following reasons;

1. They haven’t published email addresses online
2. A new company may have a new domain which may not attract spam yet
3. Their domain name is just too long or weird for spammers to discover.
4. … add you own here…

Memo to Marketing and PR people, if you’re going to publish stats like this get some proper third party research done, don’t use your own client base!

There are some cool ideas in the thread linked below, in summary mapping Jive Clearspace spaces to XMPP pub sub nodes complete with the matching access rights. Now that would be very nice.

Jivespace: XMPP Notifications ?.

You know I harp on about vendor – reseller relationships a lot because I believe if done well then resellers can materially increase the amount of business a vendor is able to close. I’m qualified to say what I think here as we are a vendor (via Cleartext’s messaging services) and a reseller (via our Cleartext Systems business). Read more…

I know it’s not nice, but when you run a business you can’t help but smile when a provider in a similar space to you has ‘issues’, especially when that provider has won business at your expense.

For the 4th time in about a year GMail has issues which always prompts me to remind everyone that our ClearEmail hosted email service has been up 100% over a similar time frame (barring scheduled maintenance).

As usual Graham producing good stuff, go here.

Not a step by step but this will help to get TwitterSpy running on Debian.

Dependencies

Make sure you have these installed (in this order?)
With Python, pysqlite and Twisted you need to download then run the following in each directory after unpacking

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

- Memcached (apt-get memcached on Debian)
- Python 2.5.x (not 2.4, 2.6 or 3, remember to reboot)
- SQLite3 (you may need to remove sqlite first, [apt-get remove sqlite])
- SQLAlchemy
- pysqlite-2.4.1
- Twisted 8.2.x (remember to reboot, odd I know)
- git (to tackle the gitfm file manager name clash)
— apt-get install git-core
— update-alternatives –config git

Installation

- Unpack Twitterspy
- git submodule init && git submodule update
- copy twitterspy.conf.sample to twitterspy.conf
- edit twitterspy.conf
- sqlite twitterspy-test.sqlite3 (to create the database)
- run ./etc/create_tables.py
- Setup a startup script in /etc/init.d
- run twisted -ny twitterspy.tac &

Leave the ‘n’ out of the above if yu’re going to be logging out and want to leave twitterspy running.

It’s nice when reputable research firms call something out that’s aligned with the Cleartext road map…

See below… ‘Messaging SaaS will take off.’

and…

‘IM and presence integration with email clients will improve, and become an increasing expectation. This will, in turn, increase demand for unified IM, and XMPP-based systems will grow as a consequence’

Also… “Spam’s being beaten”, something I’ve been seeing as an inevitable outcome heading into 2010 onwards…

Click through for the full read.

The Register is reporting that IBM is working on a new platform for web based conferencing, looks like xmpp is in the mix.

Well I’ve made it onto the Board of the XMPP Standards Foundation, see our press release. This is a significant thing for me, having been pushing Jabber/XMPP since about 1999 when Cleartext ‘version one’ was developing an Enterprise IM platform called CipherIM.

That product was modelled on the SMTP architecture with a proprietory plain text protocol. I soon ralised that this was a mistake and the last version of the CipherIM client was in fact built on the Jabber protocol, later to become XMPP.

There are big things ahead for XMPP now Cisco own Jabber Inc, look at the way Cisco has pushed the IronPort brand and products into their client base. I feel sure XMPP has a good shot at becoming the protocol of choice for human and machine based communications.

I thought I’d post this, even though it’s not the sort of contect I usually post, because it was a bit tricky to get going. A few steps to getting the Axigen (32bit) mail server running. Read more…

Well in IT security anyway. It seems that some of the gartner analysts are also concerned about Symantecs MessageLabs acquisition, inferring that email security technologies will stagnate.

This is a bit off the mark for two reasons, the first in my earlier post re: PC Tools Threat Expert and the second that MessageLabs hasn’t been that innovative in email security for a while, preferring to buy or license rather than build.

Source: SC Magazine.

It’s good to see that some other people hold similar views to me about the Symantec acquisition of MessageLabs, see the similary titled article on internetnews.com. Also David Ferris of Ferris Research (specialist messaging analyst) says that MessageLabs technology is “no longer leading edge.”

There’s no denying that MessageLabs have a good core service, but they’ve made some questionable roadmap decisions, buying OmniPod a proprietary IM platform, and OEM’img archiving from Fortiva and business continuity from MessageOne. Yes it’s true that we (Cleartext) OEM our core platform, but at least that is a single unified true SaaS platform.

Both of these are good solutions in their own right, but why buy when these types of solutions are relatively simple to build, after all they are ‘just’ email/data managment systems, far simpler to build than their core anti-spam and anti-virus services.

I’m convinced, but that doesn’t mean I’m right, that if Jabber/XMPP had strong gateways to other networks early on it would have got bigger sooner, here’s why. Read more…

CodeGear Delphi 2009 hit our office today, some cool new features in it like MS Office RibbonBar support, as long as you’re not writing an application that competes with Office of course, watch that MS small print!

The ‘credit crunch’ has visited us with a few deals dropping out at the end of September, one small US bank and a North American hospitality group both pulled the plug, maybe this is a coincidence rather than a trend… I hope.

It’s good to see that one of our competitors, Messagelabs, is playing catch up with their channel program;

‘The program adds multi-year commissions to the Standard Associate program providing partners the opportunity to accrue additional revenue by up-selling and renewing current customers’

Cleartext’s program has had multi-year commissions for a while now, it’s definitely hotting up in the SaaS (Cleartext) and Managed Service Provider (MessageLabs) type of markets. They’ll be catching up with the technology soon and adding BATV!

Huge news in the IM space today with Cisco announcing it’s acquisition of Jabber Inc the main vendor of XMPP IM and presence technology. Cisco now have and email and EIM platform, with IronPort they have email security so I suppose the next stop is FaceTime. Read more…

Akonix sold out this week which leaves just FaceTime as the only significant independent IM security vendor, not sure if this is good news or bad for the enterprise IM market.

We’re please to announce that we’ve become a sponsor of the XMPP Standards Foundation .

XMPP has been around since 1999 and was/is commonly called Jabber Instant messaging, but it’s much more than that now as social networks take off and architects are looking for a protocol to glue these systems together. XMPP has s shot at taking that space. We’ve been ‘lurking’ on the edges of IM/XMPP since 1999-2000 with our own EIM product called CipherIM which was unfortunately discontinued in 2003.

Keep checking at www.cleartext.net for news about our new XMPP platform later in 2008.

I’ve been looking for a VPS solution that offers 2Gb or more for a while now, and Slicehost have something that may run Clearspace!