This has led to the situation where different vendors define a supported device differently.

Before the contract, which began in October 2003, 700 different vendors had been approved to provide the same services, officials said.

They have to buy from different vendors and then try to put everything together in a system.

"That level of transparency is something you won't see from a lot of different vendors."

Users will be able to mix and match software from different vendors.

The biggest problem is interoperability-devices built by different vendors not connecting to each other.

Spending all this money to create their own database, and using different vendors so everything is incompatible with everybody else.

Depending on the implementation these may be from the same or different vendors.

I remember before it was nearly impossible to mix products from different vendor.

Prior to the standard, several competing solutions were developed by different vendors to address the same need.