In reply to Jonathan Rosenberg.

I fail to see how an open API = Federation.. Spark is still a walled garden. as you say no one else is going to run their own deployment/implementation of a published Cisco Spark protocol capable of federating with Cisco's Spark deployment.

I am a fan of Spark however I find this article to be misleading in what Spark actually is. From your own description its an open API that enables developers the ability create user facing applications that interact with a Cisco deployment. What happens if Cisco decides to shut down this deployment? As you say nobody else is going to be implementing a deployment. The ecosystem dies instantly.. as much as i hate email i have to ask. Why is it that we are STILL using e-mail? The communication is based on many standard protocols that let a multitude of server implementations federate with each other enabling global interchange of communication. The email ecosystem is not dependent on one company maintaining the infrastructure for it to work so it remains. (as much as we may hate the thousands of messages that hit our inbox daily)

I think we are going to simply disagree on your presentation of Spark as 'federated'.