Economy not slowing ATIS

Telecom industry companies, including service providers and equipment vendors, are not cutting back on their participation in ATIS committees and forums in light of the economy, said Susan Miller, president and CEO of the organization, but the method of participation is changing.

“What changes a great deal is them asking us to be innovative in the ways they can participate, so it's not necessarily a falling away of membership, but the focus of what we do and the innovation we can bring into how we do it,” Miller said. “Last year, we had 175 face-to-face meetings, but we had 1100 virtual meetings. That is going to go up this year. The tools to support all of that are getting better. The best ones are not widely prolific, but they are getting better.”

So instead of paying for travel, ATIS members are using Live Meeting, WebEx and other conferencing methods “and a lot of people's patience to persist in consecutive days of focusing on the work,” Miller said. “We are going to be doing trials with social networking tools to evaluate how we might use those. We don't know if those are better in the marketing/branding area or if we can actually make real usage of them in the development work.”

Miller credits the ATIS focus on tying standards to business problems for keeping companies engaged. “The formula that makes ATIS deliver continued value to all of its members is the tight coupling of where the company is going from a business perspective to what they need on the technical level — that is absolutely core to us delivering value and them staying at the table to receive that value,” she said.

Even companies such as Nortel Networks, which is in bankruptcy filings, are still participating, Miller said, although some smaller start-up companies may have cut back.