Standards

When you buy a roll of film for your camera, no matter where you are in the world, you automatically assume that the film will fit in your camera. When you travel the roads in any country in the world, it is understood that for all traffic signals red means "stop" and green means "go". Our confidence in the quality and reliability of the products and services that we purchase are made possible by standardization.

Through the process of standardization, our lives are made safer, easier, and more practical. As e-business enters the 21st century, open standards will fuel the Internet, further speeding up the pace of the Global economy. With IT environments growing increasingly heterogeneous, open standards create a common framework that allows companies to improve integration, build portable applications, and simplify the task of changing and updating a system. Today more than ever, we need open industry standards to build and integrate the new generation of applications e-business requires.

IBM is a leader in driving the development and adoption of vendor-neutral, cross-platform industry standards. From our extensive experience and product portfolio, to our development efforts and involvement with leading standard organizations, IBM demonstrates our belief that e-business is all about “cooperating on standards and competing on implementation”. Customers expect that that products and services they purchase will be consistent in quality, easy to use and maintain. Standards are voluntary rules and guidelines that help to ensure:

• Availability of products with improved quality and reliability with reduced cost;
• Better interoperability and compatibility of services and products;
• Quicker installations and ramp up times;
• More efficient product maintenance practices.

Interoperability is an absolute necessity in the Information Technology (IT) Industry today. The ability of IT equipment to work together and communicate with each other is expected and demanded by customers. Standards activities in the IT Industry continue to grow and will be an important catalyst to future growth, development and customer satisfaction.

One result is the rapid development of interoperability specifications and market formation standards which help drive the acceptance of technology in the marketplace. While the cost of technology continues to decrease and functionality grows geometrically, it is the application of the technology in the marketplace that helps drive many of the new standards. Add to that the internet and short product cycles which contribute to the need to be the first in the marketplace and you have begun to describe the competitive IT environment in which standards must evolve. The proliferation of standards activities results in more involvement on a global basis than at any other time in our history. There are many different types of standards and regulations and over the years the number of venues that have been created to generate the specifications/standards and regulations has grown substantially. A recent count indicates that over 2000+ IBMers have some involvement in standards/regulatory activities on a global scale. IBM is involved in over 400+ specifications/standards developing organizations. In addition to the visible and external standards activities, IBM has over 900+ IBM internal standards which we develop and maintain.

In view of the environment described above, the overall objective of IBM's standards activities are to enable IBM's business objectives to be met. The specific goals and objectives are:

• Identify and participate in the development of standards that will have a positive effect on our customers, IBM, and the Information Technology industry globally
• Enable IBM standards activities that are supportive of IBM's product and business directions
• Enable the implementation of appropriate standards within IBM products
• Enable IBM to participate effectively in national and international technology standards organizations
• Enable the standards program, internally and externally, to be managed in a cost effective manner