equirement. The may conform to an international standard such as Edifact for the time lag is due to the four year cycle of the international standards syntax of the message the actual data set used is often industry body, the CCITT, and then the two years it may take to develop and specific. bring a standards conformant product to market. The situation is further confused in as much as there are several The messaging marketplace used to have a black and white split national and industry standards bodies, e.g. ANSI, SMMT, who into EDI and Electronic Mail, however recent trends are creating have defined widely implemented standards ahead of the ISO/UN- many shades of grey and it is the standards process which is EDIFACT work becoming internationally adopted. Worse yet much allowing a much richer range of integrated services to become of the EDI marketplace relies on proprietary communications rather available from the major service providers. As the marketplace than OSI. becomes more sophisticated the ability to deliver a range of messa- Recently however the two strands have begun to converge with ging products down a single pipeline, thus simplifying the under- the emergence of standards which relate to both, messages and lying network, is becoming a key differentiator in the messaging movement and also addressing i.e. X.435 and X.500. A major marketplace. current activity of the service providers, such as AT&T EasyLink, is offering a bridge between the older and the newer systems SO that previous investment can be protected but access and connectivity Messaging standards can be provided to those new entrants to the community wishing to conform to the latest standards. Much standards work has previously been done in the messaging This explains the apparent paradox between a six year lag after arena, however the standards fell into two broad categories which standards are formed and there being an established EDI com- may be summarised as follows: munity. A six year wait is clearly unacceptable if a business edge i