Industry associations the SIP Forum and the IPv6 Forum have teamed up to drive the interoperability and deployment of their respective technologies.

Under terms of the partnership, the two organizations plan to collaborate on a number of initiatives to educate and co-promote the deployment and integration of session initiation protocol (SIP) and IPv6 addresses.

"SIP and IPv6 are the two fundamental Internet plumbing pieces of the future Internet. This partnership will allow the SIP Forum and the IPv6 Forum to leverage each organization's powerful worldwide user base to drive the right knowledge and best practices to the Internet community at large," said Latif Ladid, president of the IPv6 Forum and emeritus trustee of the Internet Society. "This union will smooth the adoption of these two technologies and spur Internet growth and solid sustainability."

Over the next few months, the SIP Forum and IPv6 Forum leadership will work together to formulate a joint program calendar for their combined membership, which could include co-marketing and industry events, technology interoperability initiatives and technical working group collaboration.

IPv6 is a next-generation Internet protocol that was designed to replace and improve upon IPv4; IPv6 also has a number of enhanced features and functionality designed to improve the security of IP traffic and provide more support for real-time communications. IPv6 syncs seamlessly with SIP in the application layer, which serves as a signaling protocol for handling VoIP and multimedia communications over IP networks.