The success of mobile IMPS and mobile email has always been dependent on the creation and adoption of industry standards. The commercial deployment of mobile handsets and back-end solutions based on these standards, provide the required user experience that allows mobile operators to provide IMPS and email services to the mass market across multiple vendors' products. This standardized enabling technology makes it possible for both IM and email communities to be fully extended to mobile subscribers, as well as for new mobile operator communities to be created.

OZ has been at the center of mobile messaging and email standardization from the very beginning and is dedicated to bringing the best standardized technology enablers to the market, including components that are part of the first IMPS deployments in the world.

OZ is an active member of the Open Mobile Alliance™(OMA). Nearly 200 companies representing the entire mobile services value chain established the OMA in June 2002. OMA is at the center of a mobile service standardization work dedicated to the creation of interoperable services across countries, operators and mobile terminals. OMA is demonstrating a strong industry endorsement of an open and multi-vendor business environment. Seamless end-to-end interoperability between terminals and infrastructure, as well as across service enablers, is key to the success of the mobile services market. OMA also establishes best practices for interoperability testing (IOT), including multi-standard interoperability to ensure a seamless user experience. For more information about OMA, please visit www.openmobilealliance.org

The OMA assimilated the efforts started by the Wireless Village Initiative, which was formed in April 2001 by industry leaders to define and promote a set of universal specifications for mobile instant messaging and presence services. For more information about Wireless Village, please visit www.openmobilealliance.org/wirelessvillage

OZ was an active participant in all efforts of the Wireless Village Initiative and continues to actively participate in evolving the IMPS and email specifications within the OMA.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. The actual technical work of the IETF is done in its working groups, which are organized by topic into several areas (e.g., routing, transport, security, etc.). Much of the work is handled via mailing lists. The IETF holds meetings three times per year and is open to all interested.

The SIMPLE working group of the IETF is working on defining extensions to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as well as additional protocols required for Instant Messaging and Presence. Additionally core extensions to the SIP protocol are now under the responsibility of the SIPPING working group. For more information about IETF, please visit www.ietf.org

OZ actively monitors the efforts of the IETF for ongoing synchronization with OMA efforts.

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a collaboration established in December 1998 to produce globally applicable Technical Specifications and Technical Reports for a 3rd Generation Mobile System based on evolved GSM core networks. Additionally. There is a similar collaboration for evolved CDMA networks under the 3GPP2.

3GPP has taken the work done by IETF and taken into account all the wireless specific issues from a 3G perspective. They have also taken into account various operator, regulatory, interoperability, scalability and security issues that are not necessarily related to wireless access, but nevertheless are important for a 3G solution. 3GPP has defined the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) in the 3GPP Release 5 specifications for VoIP and is working on Release 6, which adds presence, IM, group management and conferencing functions to IMS phase 2. Additional work for Release 6 is based on ongoing IETF work. For more information about IETF, please visit www.3GPP.org

OZ actively monitors the efforts of the 3GPP for ongoing synchronization with OMA efforts.