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.
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