Paris, September 15, 2000

TINA Consortium was formed in 1993 by 46 of the world’s leading Telco operators, vendors and IT industry with the mission to define a common software architecture for telecommunications. As a result, the "TINA architecture" has been developed over the past eight years by a group of some one hundred engineers from its member companies, working together at one time under one roof in New Jersey, USA, as its core team. The resulting architecture specifications were consolidated as "TINA v1.0 Deliverables and Specifications" in September 2000, and have been put on the following URL for an open access to the whole telecom community: http://www.tinac.com/specifications/specifications.htm.

It has also produced a book entitled "The TINA Book" published in 1999 from Prentice-Hall Europe authored by Y. Inoue, C. Mossotto, M. Lapierre, et al., ISBN: 0-13-095400-4.

Dr. S. Kano, TINA-C’s current President, announced at the TINA Conference 2000 held in Paris, 13-15 September 2000, that TINA Consortium (TINA-C) reached the decision that it had completed its mission and should be dissolved at the end of this year. "This does not mean however the end of TINA technology," stressed Dr. Kano, "as the quest for enhancing and implementing TINA technology will continue." In particular the following activities will carry on:

1. The consolidated TINA v1.0 Deliverables and Specifications will continue to be available at  http://www.tinac.com/specifications/specifications.htm;
2. The results will continue to be transferred to appropriate standards bodies such as OMG, ITU-T, and 3GPP, to either form the basis of their standards/specifications or to be incorporated as part of them;
3. The TINA International Scientific Committee will be re-established to maintain the high scientific and cultural value of TINA concepts and technologies and hold the biennial TINA conferences;
4. Implementation activities will continue among IT industry to produce TINA-compliant software packages. One notable example is the TINA China Project Group, which is considering the use of TINA concepts and architecture to build their next generation networks from 2001 and onwards.
5. A fellowship program is created to sponsor a number of TINA-related research proposals which will be pursued by Universities or equivalent Academic institutions after the termination of TINA Consortium (see http://www.tinac.com/fellowship/Doc2Rev2TINAFellowship.doc)

Paolo Coppo of CSELT, Italy, Chairperson of TINA-C’s Technical Forum, added that "At this Conference we have celebrated the TINA success in terms of achievements along four main directions: specifications, contribution to standardisation bodies, productization and cultural growth. As a paradox, when TINA ideas and concepts will so much become 'business as usual' that nobody will remember they were not obvious some time ago, the 'disappearance of TINA' will be considered the ultimate measure of TINA success".