Technology news and Jobs arrow VIRTUALISATION arrow Industry heavyweights demand fewer standards bodies
Industry heavyweights demand fewer standards bodies E-mail
by Stuart Corner   
Monday, 12 October 2009
The CTOs of some of the word's leading IT&T vendors - including Cisco and Microsoft - and some of the largest telcos - including BT, NTT and Telstra - have joined forces in a bid to rationalise what they see as an excess of different, and sometimes competing, organisations developing IT&T standards.

The group of 19 CTOs (or similar) and representatives of the International Telecommunication Union's Telecommunications Standardisation Bureau (ITU-T) held what will be the first of regular meetings in Geneva last week. According to the official communique of that meeting they are concerned that the standardisation landscape has become too complicated and fragmented, with "hundreds of industry forums and consortia in addition to national, regional and international SDOs [standards development organisations] competing for business."

They say it is becoming "increasingly more challenging for the ICT industry to identify and prioritise the places to concentrate their standardisation resources" and have called for a review of the standardisation scenario in order to identify priorities for the industry.

They propose that the review include: principles on why and what types of standards are needed; identification of the different SDOs, their roles and capabilities; and implementation of improvements to the present standards scenario so that SDOs complement rather than compete with one another.

"The intent is to focus standards efforts on key standardisation organisations and foster faster and more efficient production of standards, so as to avoid duplication across organisations and improve speed of development and time to market...In a fragile economic environment and an ICT ecosystem characterised by increased convergence between the worlds of legacy telecoms and IT sectors, it is imperative to develop standards that reduce complexity and maintain consistency, foster innovation and enable industry to deliver cost-effective and interoperable products, services and applications."

The meeting had its origins in a Global Standards Symposium in October 2008, at the World Telecommunication Standardisation Assembly (WTSA-08, Johannesburg). The symposium passed a resolution requiring ITU-T "to strengthen its efforts to respond to the needs of high-level industry executives in terms of their identified requirements and priorities for standardisation, in order to strengthen the role of ITU-T, taking account of the needs of developing countries."

The Geneva meeting was convened by Malcolm Johnson, director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau, who invited the CTOs and equivalents of "19 leading companies of the ICT industry, representing major telecom operators and manufacturers, and software vendors."

CONTINUED

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