In recent years several authors and projects have addressed the need for an architecture for collecting and managing context information. Most of the approaches have either been purely based in middlewares unable to address the heterogeneity of components and services platforms, or have been built around Web based technologies that are unable to cope with the realtime and reactiveness requirements that many context- aware use cases have. In this paper the authors propose a new Context Management Architecture able to solve these problems. Furthermore, this architecture, exploring the XMPP protocol, can be used as the basis for new developments in this area.