Jabber End of Development

[pepemex04]

Rumor is Cisco is no longer going to do any further feature development for Jabber besides some features coming up in the next release.  They want everyone to move to Spark.  They have given Jabber 3-4 years more before they announce end of life.   Anyone here knows if this is true?

[skilambi]

Pedro

Nothing like that is true. While spark is definitely the messaging tool of the future there is still a very solid base for customers to use jabber type clients. Being a partner no information like this has been announced by cisco product managers

Thanks

Srini

[MarcusPresidio]

Many people said that about Jabber and CUCI-Lync a few years ago.  As long as there is a demand for on-premise, real time communication, Jabber will be available.  Customers dictate what products and features are available not the other way around.

[cotang · Accepted solution]

Pedro, Jabber has very active development and roadmap going on at this time. We are seeing robust sales and large scale deployments in the market and we are committed to continue to invest and improve Jabber for the foreseeable future.

[pepemex04]

We heard this announcement directly from Cisco SE/AM.  They advised us to start moving to Spark if its a green field install, they were told Jabber had reached feature maturity and would eventually be end of sale.  We were about to deploy Jabber with the possibility of removing over our current Lync environment.  But this announcement has now made us re-evaluate removing Lync

[skilambi]

Pedro

Having dealt with many customers I can tell you there are various tools for various purposes. On one hand some customers have migrated to a texting/messaging tool and others rely on ad-hoc 1:1 with classic IM/P with a s strong set of telephony features. You can't tell all customer's to just leave one way and adopt another overnight, there is a bridge and while the world is infatuated by spark like messaging tools the reality is there are many who are fine with Jabber/Lync style tools. Can we see the whole world adopt to one style(maybe) but that is a long way away and varies based on customer/vertical industry.

So the messaging from your account team is frankly a bit rough around the edge. Spark definitely is where Gartner and the industy seems it going i.e. work stream oriented tools and there is only so much you can keep adding to Jabber. After all what more is left to add to IM/P to begin with, most of those features already exist on Jabber

The key on your end is to evaluate your end user interactions and decide which tool makes the most sense.

[Mike Spooner]

Good day Pedro,

Based on our insights, Jabber is here to stay for the foreseeable future. True, their is a big marketing push for Spark. However, your choice is dependent upon your or your customer's business requirements. We actually just released a new technical article regarding Jabber and the next major iOS release. You can read it here:

[RITR]

Well, almost a year later and you can tell the product is dead. They were releasing new versions on average about every 120 days between 11.5 and 11.8. It took 246 days for 11.9 to arrive (hence OP) and now it's been 170 days since then. Talk is cheap.

[cotang]

Jabber 12.0 is about to be released in March 2018 with Multi-line support (8 lines), a full complement of mid call features, a new Phone mode with contacts deployment option, single number reach control, and a brand new Jabber BOT SDK for building automated bots for use within Jabber. Please join the Customer Connection Program product roadmap sessions to find out what is being planned after 12.0!

[RITR]

One big hoopla, 200+ days in the making, before sending it off into the sunset.

[skilambi]

How is that any different what MSFT is doing for that matter? They are doing very much the same and investing only in Teams. Next version of SFB is also the exact same just a maintenance release to bridge them to teams

The point is vendors have to pivot where the market is heading at least jabber has multi line which sfb still doesn’t have after all these years.

If you want to blame anyone blame slack or the million other work stream vendors pitching this type of solutions. Even Ring central with glip is doing the same

Point is if a vendor has to pick and choose between clients and all your competitors and customers are also moving in that direction what do you expect to happen?

Thanks

Srini

[RITR]

@Srini -- I'm just pointing it out.... I agree, this is an industry-wide thing.

@thlamber - As my timetable above highlights, there is a change in the release schedule (almost 2x as slow) which is indicative of a dying product. I am seeing this happen with all kinds of different on-prem products; Jabber is nothing different. Call my observations whatever you want.. the timetable shows a decline.

[thlamber]

It does not, there has always been a 6 mth release cycle, you are just making things up now

[RITR]

@thlamber, I'll just let the facts talk.. as I mentioned before.. talk is cheap.

Release	Date	Days Past
11.5.0	12/21/2015	N/A
11.6.0	4/21/2016	122
11.7.0	7/28/2016	98
11.8.0	12/5/2016	130
11.9.0	8/8/2017	246
12.0.0	3/1/2018 (est)	205

Average before v11.9: (122+98+130)/3 = 117/30 = 3.8mo

Average v11.9 and after: (246+205)/2 = 226/30 = 7.5mo

7.5 / 2 = 3.75 which oddly enough, lines up pretty much exactly with my "almost 2x as slow" statement.

Dang I'm good.

[thlamber]

averages out at 6 mths, adjusts slightly if there are some big features. Data can be twisted anyway you want but you assumptions are still incorrect. Jabber is still in full development and is feature rich release on release