Talks are ongoing between members of the NGIO Forum — which includes Dell, Hitachi, Intel, NEC, Siemens and Sun Microsystems — and the competing Future I/O Forum, which includes Compaq, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The two camps lay out separate paths and time frames for delivering switch-based I/O subsystems for PC servers and networking gear and peripherals.

"The companies are still talking, so it's not like there is a standoff by any means," said Charles Andres, who chairs the NGIO marketing group. "The differences continue to be more political than technical. But if there is going to be a merger, I think it is going to have to happen in the next three months because beyond that there will be too much momentum."

It's essential for the two groups to reach an understanding, according to James Gruener, an analyst for the Aberdeen Group (Boston). "It's incumbent on these groups to work together so that there can be one standard, or else we will have a fiasco of people buying systems but not knowing which network subsystems to buy with them."

In the meantime, developers feel they have to split their bets and track activities in both camps, while being careful of the resources they risk on any one of the proposals. "Fundamentally, the biggest problem is getting developers to take that significant step," Gruener said.

In an effort to capture developers' interest, NGIO Forum announced it has released its 1.0 spec to its 75 members. The spec includes details defining host and target controllers (called channel adapters), a physical layer, an NGIO software stack and an underlying hardware switch.

While few details about these components were released, the company did sketch out its software architecture, which involves use of standard NGIO software library elements which might be supplied by multiple companies, as well as a Channel Access Layer and an abstraction layer for host channel adapters.

"These are thin layers," said Andres. "The intent is to make software drivers generic and independent of the operating systems and underlying hardware."

"There's a requirement to create an architecture that developers can readily write drivers for," said Gruener. "But getting everyone to write to a single driver model is very difficult. How will they get to this [layered software approach] is the question."

The NGIO Forum hopes to ship systems late next year. But the "real product readiness [for NGIO] is hard to determine because it will depend on support from a number of third parties, and I can't get as grasp of where they really are in that process," Gruener said. "Any initiative like this is contingent upon developing a variety of products that work together. I think their schedule is very aggressive."