Sydney, Australia. October 8th, 2008

Soon after Cisco acquires Jabber Inc, the leading vendor of XMPP (IM and Presence) solutions, Cleartext co-founder David Banes is voted onto the board of the XMPP Standards Foundation.

Cleartext, a leading provider of managed messaging and messaging security services to enterprise and SMB markets, today announced that its Managing Director/CEO, David Banes, has been voted onto the board of the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) Standards Foundation.

"Todays instant messaging and social networks are becoming valid replacements for email but many of these have been developed using proprietary protocols. XMPP is an IETF (Internet Engineering task Force) standard and as such is being used to build new platforms, like Googles GTalk and FaceBooks own IM. Some legacy IM networks are moving towards XMPP so that they can participate in an open, federated network, just like email." said David Banes

The mission of the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is to build an open, standardized, secure, feature-rich, widely-deployed, decentralized infrastructure for real-time communication and collaboration over the Internet. Banes is well placed to promote the Foundation with more than twenty years experience in messaging and IT security and holding a position on the board of the Internet Industry Association (IIA) he's hoping to help push the XMPP message to the Australia internet industry.

If you'd like to know more about XMPP contact: David Banes for comment on +61 2 8001 2600.

About Cleartext

First established in 1999 Cleartext pioneered secure IM with a secure Enterprise IM platform called CipherIM. The company re-launched and moved into Managed Services in 2005. ClearEmail a professional email hosting service was launched in 2006 and ClearEmail MX Managed Email Security in 2007. The company launched ClearEmail EDM in February 2008.

Cleartext delivers messaging and social networking solutions as SaaS (Software as a Service) and via it's application hosting agreements with companies like Jive Software(Clearspace), Jabber Inc(Jabber XCP), Axigen(Email Server) and Attensa(RSS feed server). Cleartext is currently developing new products and services in the business messaging and social networking space.

About the XMPP Standards Foundation

The XMPP Standards Foundation (formerly the Jabber Software Foundation) is an independent, nonprofit standards development organization whose primary mission is to define open protocols for presence, instant messaging, and real-time communication and collaboration on top of the IETF's Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

The XSF also provides information and infrastructure to the worldwide community of Jabber/XMPP developers, service providers, and end users. Although our elected members and self-selected sponsors provide a legal and financial basis for the organization, the XSF not a closed industry consortium but instead is a completely open and transparent standards development organization in which any interested individual may freely participate.