A group of 13 ISDN equipment manufacturers has formed the Vendors ISDN Association, with the aim of speeding the uptake of ISDN by users. The group has decided on four key objectives: to speed the availability of interoperable ISDN customer equipment solutions; to drive the development of application market requirements through the adoption of open standards and consistent implementations; to simplify the configuration of ISDN equipment and promote open network interoperability standards and testing. The first project to be worked on will be the development of automated ISDN configuration capabilities, to eliminate the current requirement that users configure their systems by entering information about their telephone switch and Service Profile Identifier. The Association hopes to have automated capabilities in place by the end of the year. It has formal affiliation with both the US National ISDN Users Forum and the National ISDN Council and holds its first member meeting Networld+ Interop in Atlanta in September. Founder members are Adtran Inc, Ascend Communications Inc, Bay Networks Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Digi International Inc, Eicon Technology Corp, Intel Corp, ITK Inc, Microsoft Corp, Motorola Inc, Shiva Corp, 3Com Corp and US Robotics Inc.
