One of the industry’s lesser known consortia, the Intelligent Network Forum, holds its first annual meeting in Chicago this week, and is expected to outline its plans for the coming year. Formed in late 1995, the INF is a non-profit organization of service providers, equipment vendors, software developers, system integrators and research and engineering organizations. Its goal is to provide a forum for intelligent network issues, develop standards and implementation agreements, help with interoperability and application development issues and provide information and education. One area of concern is interoperability between service creation and management platforms. The INF started with 21 founding members, including Bellcore, Hewlett-Packard, Lucent Technologies, Motorola Inc, Tandem Computers, Texas Instruments and Versant Object Technology, but has since grown to 30-plus. There is a Web site at www.inf.org
