Formed in 1999, ISTO has an affiliation with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - a separate legal and autonomous entity incorporated in the State of Delaware, USA.
ISTO offers industry associations, trade groups, and consortia a means to form technical organizations - and a vehicle to develop specifications, promote technologies and gain market acceptance.
ISTO works with collective startups and had established entities alike to provide the legal infrastructure, operational support and tools required to accomplish specific goals.
The concept of the ISTO as an umbrella organization under which industry standards activities could be performed efficiently and successfully had been demonstrated and the opportunities for new Programs continued to grow.
Liability Insurance/Indemnification – ISTO carries a comprehensive package of insurance policies (renewed annually) to cover all member alliances organized under its legal umbrella.
Membership Management Systems that are fully integrated with group calendaring, committee dashboards, eVoting modules, wikis, member rosters, email reflectors and secure document/ communications repositories Collaboration tools to support remote meetings, online communities, user groups and online specifications development Website hosting and content/domain management Systems administration and development and management of databases, email programs, internal communications and other needs Open source tools including open source repositories for code development and collaboration and other Web 2.0 tools Media monitoring to measure news about member organizations and/or related technologies ISTO supports the setup and ongoing administration of various models for standardization, compliance/interoperability test programs, and licensing by its member alliances.
ISTO supports daily AP/AR and invoicing requirements for member Programs as well as the annual obligations of financial audits and tax filings.