Cisco Systems Inc, Menlo Park, California, has managed to pull 12 other companies behind it in its attempt to develop its APPI, Advanced Program-to-Program Internetworking alternative to IBM Corp’s Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking. The inaugural meeting of the APPI Forum will take place tomorrow at the InterOp show in San Francisco. Apart from Cisco itself, the members are Alcatel NV, British Telecommunications Plc, Cabletron Systems Inc, Cascade Communications Inc, Digital Equipment Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Infonet Inc, McData Inc, Netrix Inc, Proteon Inc, Sun Microsystem Inc’s SunConnect and Synoptics Communications Inc. The Forum has also outlined its goal of submitting a full specification of the technology to the influential Internet Engineering Task Force, IETF, by the middle of next year. The group reckons that official approval will follow around two years later. But the group’s urgency is underlined by its statement that a product demonstration is scheduled for next August’s Interop. Presumably these will be reference implementations of the proposed standards that the IETF will be examining. Joining fees have yet to be set, but the Forum says that it is particularly looking for users to join its efforts.
