Leaders of 36 IT standards bodies and industry consortia
met last week at the Informal Forum Summit of the International
Telecommunication Union's Telecommunication Standardisation Sector
(ITU-T), where they shared insights and discussed possible areas of
co-operation.
The two-day meeting in San Francisco was the second such summit
spearheaded by Houlin Zhao, director of the ITU's Telecommunication
Standardisation Bureau (TSB). The first was in December 2001.
Most of the discussion revolved around ways to facilitate
communication in the future rather than actual co-operative
initiatives between specific bodies, Zhao said.
Zhao kicked off the summit initiative in 1999 as a way to
improve the ITU-T's relationship with industry forums and their
relationships with each other, he said. He also sought to counter
the proliferation of industry organisations by helping existing
ones work together on new issues.
Organisations represented at the summit included the Third
Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and 3GPP-2, the International
Forum on 4th-Generation Mobile Communications (4G Forum), the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the IPv6 Forum, the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Organization for the Advancement
of Structured Information Systems (Oasis).
Co-operation among such groups can help foster new technologies
and the markets for them, participants said.
"Each of us sees the opportunity of working together as a way
that we can advance... products to market. By working together and
diminishing the amount of duplication that might otherwise exist,
we actually also reduce the cost in some cases," said Ron Young,
chairman of the Metro Ethernet Alliance.
A broad statement agreed on by the 69 representatives called for
co-operation to increase the collective value of the technologies
they work on and allow for a more accessible global information
network, Zhao said.
It also called for co-operation to accelerate standardisation of
technologies, share best practices, use economies of scale and
improve interoperability.
The representatives also agreed on some co-operative activities
and common areas.
Stephen Lawson writes for IDG News Service