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Mountain View Alliance Formed to Enable the COTS Ecosystem Through Coordinated Open Specifications; NPF, PICMG and the SA Forum Establish Alliance of Open Standard Specification Groups Focused on Evolving Communications ApplicationsCHICAGO --(Business Wire)-- June 7, 2005 -- Alliance Founding Members Collectively Cover Substantial Portion of Application Requirements, with Other Members Soon to Join The Mountain View Alliance (MVA) was formally launched today as a new MacroForum with founding representatives from leading open specification organizations - the Network Processing Forum (NPF), the PCI Industrial Computers Manufacturers Group (PICMG) and the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum). The MVA provides a forum for the coordination of the technical and marketing activities of its member organizations. The MVA will also promote an environment for coexistence and compatibility to allow real applications to be created from commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) elements. Real-life interoperability is a significant goal of the MVA and MVA members will work to harmonize their respective specifications aiming to avoid gaps, overlaps and inconsistencies that would lead to technical conflict. The group's founding members have been holding regular marketing and technical meetings since December 2004. These meetings have also been attended by representatives from a number of other industry groups. Initially the Mountain View Alliance will focus on the communications market segment but, as with the members specifications, it is expected that its efforts will be widely applicable in other markets as well. The MVA will actively promote its member organizations specifications but not individual company products. The goal of its marketing activities will be to coordinate efforts and messages between the groups and accelerate the growth of the COTS ecosystem for open communications platforms. "The efforts of the Mountain View Alliance recognize that users are now looking at the 'overall solution' and this requires closer cooperation between our respective organizations," said Joe Pavlat, president of PICMG. "This alliance is a classic example of the whole being stronger than the sum of the parts and we wholeheartedly support this effort," said Russ Dietz, chairman of the Network Processing Forum. "We expect that closer coordination of efforts will result in increased innovation by member companies as they spend less of their time solving system integration issues," said Deepak Shahane, president of the SA Forum. The Mountain View Alliance will continue to hold regular meetings and will be announcing results and future events in the coming months. About the Mountain View Alliance Member Organizations Network Processing Forum Founded in 2001, the Network Processing Forum (NPF) is an international industry consortium of networking semiconductor, software and OEM manufacturers accelerating the adoption of network processing technologies through the development and implementation of network processing standards and benchmarks. By establishing standard interfaces and benchmarks, the NPF helps semiconductor manufacturers, software developers, services companies and system OEMs lower development costs, shorten design cycles, reduce product time-to-market and increase product time-in-market. The Forum includes members from around the world that provide network processing products and services globally. For more information, visit the NPF website at www.npforum.org. PICMG Founded in 1994, PICMG is a consortium of over 400 companies that collaboratively develops open specifications for high performance telecommunications and industrial computing applications. PICMG specifications included AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC and CompactPCI. The members of the consortium have a long history of developing and using leading edge products for these industries. For information about PICMG membership, or to find out how to obtain PICMG specifications, visit the PICMG website at www.picmg.org. Service Availability Forum The Service Availability(TM) Forum is a consortium of industry-leading communications and computing companies working together to foster an ecosystem that enables the use of commercial off-the-shelf building blocks in the creation of high availability network infrastructure products, systems and services. To achieve this goal, the Service Availability Forum develops and publishes high availability and management software interface specifications while promoting and facilitating their adoption by industry. Service Availability Forum membership offers the opportunity to help frame and implement the Service Availability solution. For more information about the Service Availability Forum, visit www.saforum.org. |
