From Computer Reseller's:
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3Com, Compaq head up Mobile Advisory Council
By Kimberly Caisse
Waltham, Mass.
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To speed up the acceptance of industry standards for laptop products, 3Com Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. jointly will spearhead an advisory board created to funnel information to industry standards groups.
The Mobile Advisory Council (MAC), which is expected to be made up of about 18 system, peripheral and component manufacturers, will focus on developing standards for notebooks rather than let desktop-oriented standards filter down to the notebook level, said Rebecca Krull, director of the new business planning group in Santa Clara, Calif.-based 3Com's Mobile Communications division.
Because the mobile market growth rate is so high and mobile products are now a significant part of the computing environment, mobile product vendors "need a unified voice," she said.
By having one voice to speak to the organizations that set industry standards, companies can avoid being caught in the crossfire when two or more competing standards enter the marketplace. "We have seen examples of where two different standards will contradict each other," Krull said.
One standard that could have benefited from this kind of advisory group was the mobile modem standard for PCMCIA cards, said Ted Clark, vice president of marketing in the portable PC division of Compaq, Houston.
A mobile advisory group should improve communication between vendors and Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp., said Gerry Purdy, president of Mobile Insights Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based market-research firm.
"The vendors are all dealing with all of their issues [and] trying to get the proper attention of Wintel, but Wintel has the reverse problem of trying to effectively manage all of the issues regarding portables with the different vendors," Purdy said.
"The MAC will represent a way for the vendors to get their concerns together and form a priority of discussion topics with Wintel," he said. "Wintel supports this, since it makes their life better by dealing more effectively with, in effect, the 'notebook vendor union.' "
Clark said with an advisory consortium in place, many mobile concerns and issues can be addressed when they are noticed early in the system-designing process, which is when problems "are not as visible."
The council likely will tackle power management in notebooks, easing the disconnection and connection of notebooks to networks, remote network management and dynamic IP addressing for mobile users. Input will be sought on the PC99, PC2000 and Device Bay specifications, as well as the 1394 and Universal Serial Bus standards.
3Com became a co-coordinator of this effort because it is "impacted by the mobile issues," Krull said.
In addition to 3Com and Compaq, companies such as Acer America Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Hitachi PC Corp., IBM Corp., Phoenix Technologies, TDK, Toshiba Corp. and Xircom Inc., have joined the council. |
