Wide-Area Networking Forums Plan Merger

Two of the most influential networking industry groups are planning to merge in an attempt to speed development and deployment of common Layer 2 specifications.

The MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance and the ATM Forum said that by combining their efforts, a single organization would better and faster work towards establishing multivendor, multiservice, packet-based networks and associated applications.

Members of both organizations will vote on the proposal by the end of this quarter. If approved, the merger should be completed by the end of the year. The groups are already holding a joint meeting this week in Salt Lake City. Similar joint events are being planned.

Carriers and vendors have long campaigned for a single industry forum and a common suite of implementation agreements across ATM, frame relay and multiprotocol label switching to reduce the time to market for new network capabilities and services.

The merger would create a unified industry association with a combined membership of over 100 companies representing the world's major service providers, equipment vendors, software and silicon suppliers and enterprise end-users.The interim board of the merged forum would include representatives from Alcatel, Agilent Technologies, Bell Canada, Ericsson, Harris Corporation, Lucent Technologies, Riverstone Networks, Sprint, Tellabs and Verizon.

Proponent Andrew Malis of Tellabs, president and chairman of the board of the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance, said the "unification of the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance and the ATM Forum will provide a huge boost to the multiservice interworking goals shared by both organizations."

News of the likely merger was welcomed. "This is great news for the industry," said Stu Elby, vice president of Network Architecture and Enterprise Technology within the Verizon Technology Organization. "The benefit to carriers, and to Verizon in particular, is that now there will be a single body creating [implementation agreements], which will reduce the ambiguity that vendors currently face with joint ATM and MPLS technology development," Elby added.