SMBs looking for an easy solution for instant messaging will get access next week to a new secure business-grade IM appliance from Jabber. On Tuesday, Jabber will ship its JabberNow appliance, which the company says can allow SMBs and enterprise workgroups to set up secure IM in about 15 minutes.
The plug-and-play appliance is based on Jabber's XCP (Extensible Communications Platform) for enterprises, which in turn is based on the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) open standard.
The decision to package Jabber's enterprise technology into an appliance was driven largely by government customers who were looking for quick IM and presence interoperability with state and local agencies but didn't want to require the smaller agencies to buy into a whole software stack, said Michael Helfrich, senior vice president of product strategy and marketing.
"With the appliance, we took XCP and insulated the complexity of configuration. We made it Linksys simple," he said, referring to the easy-to-configure wireless router from Cisco Systems.
Other industries Jabber is targeting with the appliance include financial services, manufacturing, legal, and consulting.
Adding to its SMB appeal, the JabberNow appliance snaps into existing enterprise infrastructure and requires minimal IT support, Helfrich said.
JabberNow is natively interoperable with any other XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) server and works with any XMPP client, Jabber officials said, including the recently announced Google Talk IM client. The appliance also ships with a Macromedia Flash-based Jabber client and can be configured to work with AOL's AIM network.
Within the next month Jabber plans to ship connectors for both IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Microsoft Live Communications Server.
Other add-on features available include message archiving, an SMS (Short Message System) gateway and LDAP integration. The appliance supports up to 1,000 users. Pricing starts at $2,495 for 25 users.
Looking at the company's road map, in the first quarter of next year, Jabber is planning to release connectors that will allow an XMPP-based phone to ring an SIP phone. Jabber has based its technology on XMPP but is committed to adding support for other IM and telephony protocols -- including SIP and SIMPLE (SIP for IM and Presence Leveraging Extensions) -- where it makes sense, Helfrich said.
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