Industry Connections Program Launched by IEEE Standards Association

The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE (News - Alert)-SA) has announced the launch of its new Industry Connections program. This new initiative aims to help like-minded companies to quickly and cost-effectively come together in the early stages of collaborative work in a technical area.

Groups will have the unique opportunity of leveraging IEEE and IEEE-SA resources in a customized format and produce varied content, including proposals for standards, white papers, specialized tools, online databases, data feeds and/or video.

“Industries typically reach a stage where some level of consensus must occur around some market-enabling technologies in order to trigger the next burst of innovation and market growth,” said Judy Gorman, IEEE-SA managing director, in a statement. “But setting up a formal consortium from scratch is no inconsequential task. The effort typically includes such complex mandates as guaranteeing indemnity protection and limitation of antitrust damages, often requiring a year’s worth of effort before a group’s real work can begin.”

By addressing the earliest stages of the standards-development lifecycle, Industry Connections can serve as an incubator for new IEEE standards-related activities. The program also enables the group to assume a protected collaboration environment with minimal effort and expense to rapidly concentrate on its core purpose.

“Industry Connections is designed to streamline the incorporation and intellectual-property logistics, and free a group to instead focus on a common industry or business problem and accelerate needed work products that include but are not limited to standards,” added Gorman.

With this new program, groups will be able to efficiently and economically build industry understanding and consensus in new technical areas; develop roadmaps for the creation and usage of consensus documents; access the need for standardization as well as make decisions on most appropriate form and venue.

“Industry Connections has provided the ICSG the ideal avenue into efficient collaboration around computer security,” said Jeff Green, ICSG chair and senior vice president of McAfee (News - Alert) Avert Labs. “Instead of concentrating on the necessary but tedious details around forming a group, we have been able to dive in to our primary, shared objective of combating the systematic and rapid rise in computer security threats.”

This program aims to bring security vendors together to collaborate early-stage technologies quickly and effectively so they might be able to create new standards. Whether or not vendors act on the opportunity is yet to be seen.

 

In addition to this new program, IEEE has also announced its intentions to act as the APWG eCrime Researchers Summit’s sole technical sponsor. This conference is the world’s only peer-reviewed technical conference dedicated exclusively to electronic crime research.