All for One: Should a company join a multipartner alliance? Here are the questions to ask

The idea behind them is to link research and engineering efforts, pool investments and share marketing and advertising costs, all in hopes of creating a technology standard or platform around which huge new markets will arise for the products of the MPA's members. The alliance, which was founded in 1999 and led early on by a handful of companies including 3COM Corp., Agere Systems, a spinoff of Lucent Technologies Inc., and Cisco Systems Inc., emerged victorious after a several-year battle with three rival MPAs, all competing to create the standard technology for wireless local area networks, or WLANs.