Standards Organizations: Work With Me

Technology groups aimed at enabling interoperability are on hand at GLOBALCOMM to discuss their progress and underscore the importance in continued cooperation between the various sectors of communication platforms.

Executives representing industry organizations including the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA), Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), and Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) along with the SCOPE Alliance discussed the steps that are being taken to ensure products will pass interoperability testing and certification.

Shlomo Pri-Tal, CP-TA chairman and president and a Motorola Inc. executive, outlined some of the advantages gained by the technology community when all disparate entities – suppliers, software vendors, hardware manufacturers – work together. Creating a dynamic to bring about open standards is the goal, Pri-Tal said. The reward? "For service providers, it's faster to revenue," Pri-Tal said.

Each of the speakers discussed the necessity of interoperability in "the building blocks" of the platforms, even while each company among the sectors retains its own competitiveness.

OSDL's Ibrahim Haddad pointed to his organizations' work in the carrier-grade Linux working group. By fostering the adoption of Linux, and working with the CP-TA and SA Forum organizations, the group can help "ensure interoperability by enabling certification of key system building blocks," said Bill Weinberg, OSDL senior technology analyst.

"Linux is the core," Haddad said.

In addition to a speedier entrance of a service to market, interoperability will accelerate innovation and reduce the lifecycle required for development, said Jon Kenton of the SA Forum. Kenton added there are "four specs out there and published as of today," that have been green-stamped by the organizations. Such openness is a boon for all the players.

The groups' collective momentum around interoperability is helping to drive a "mainstream market for standards-based communication platforms," the companies said.

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