One group's alphabet soup is another group's milestone as proved this week by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions and the Internet Protocol Detail Record Organization (IPDR.org) as they collaborated to get approval by the American National Standard for a next-generation accounting management standard.

That standard, developed by ATIS and known as the Usage Data Management for Packet-Based Services--Service Neutral Protocol Specification for Billing Applications (ATIS-PP-0300075.1.200x) incorporates the IPDR protocol, which is a "service-neutral" specification that supports billing of packet-based services.

The IPDR protocol can be applied to any IP service and application, including gaming, IPTV, voice over IP and video-on-demand. IPDR.org also launched an industry-wide forum this week address accounting and settlement issues for IPTV. The group will meet Thursday and Friday this week at a conference hosted by Cisco Systems in San Jose, Calif.

"We want all parties--service providers, the vendor community or anyone--interested in resolving the issues around usage management, gathering and settlement exchange or getting together to define the requirements for network data management," said Kelly Anderson, president and chief operating officer of IPDR.org.

ATIS will attend the conference and present the work program developed by its recently established IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF), a new committee that will produce standards and other IPTV industry solutions.

The ATIS-PP standard was developed by the Telecom Management and Operations Committee (TMOC) within ATIS. The ANS recently approved it for trial use by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). It is the first of a series of on-going collaborative standardization activities underway between ATIS and IPDR.org.

The ATIS/TMOC joined in a "harmonization agreement" with the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in recent months to propose the accounting management standard to the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunications Sector (ITU-T). The ITU-T will consider integrating the new standard with the 3GPP IP multimedia subsystem architecture management solution in its NGN Accounting Management standardization activities.

ATIS President Susan Miller said in a statement that ATIS' primary objective is to produce solutions that meet the true business needs of the industry and that ATIS is pleased with the result of its ongoing collaboration with IPDR.org.