SAN RAMON, Calif.-The PAM Forum plus Parlay Group now equals the Parlay Group. Both standards groups are merging into the Parlay Group in a process that will be completed by mid-June, according to the organizations.
The PAM Forum, a consortium that establishes the presence and availability standards, and the Parlay Group, a leading, open, multivendor consortium, will help set P&A standards for applications across multiple, disparate networks in both wireless and other telecom fields.
Both groups said they have been cooperating leading to this announcement.
“Through its previous collaboration with the Parlay Group, parts of the PAM Forum specifications have already been integrated into the Parlay specification and consequently accepted by the Third Generation Partnership Project and 3GPP2, the worldwide organizations developing the technical specifications for a third-generation mobile system,” PAM Forum said.
The industry has been moving toward open platforms during the past few years, and the closing of ranks between 3GPP and 3GPP2 only underlines this trend, which includes the increasing interoperability and the formation of groups like the Open Mobile Alliance. Recently big vendors like Nokia Corp., Siemens AG and L.M. Ericsson came together to set standards for Internet Protocol multimedia services.
“Working together over the last two years, our organizations have pioneered the definition of open APIs for presence services, enabling whole new types of applications for service providers,” said Zygmunt A. Lozinski, Parlay Group president and telecom solution executive at IBM.
The Parlay Group covers more than 50 members and some of them include Alcatel, British Telecom, Ericsson, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Incomit, Lucent Technologies Inc., NTT DoCoMo, Siemens and Sun Microsystems.
“This represents an unprecedented opportunity to build on and further develop P&A standards and specifications, supported by the membership base necessary to successfully integrate P&A solutions worldwide,” said George Hallenbeck, chief executive officer of Evolving Systems and chair of the PAM Forum.
