Joe McGarvey is a principal analyst with Current Analysis and a regular columnist for xchange. He can be reached at jmcgarvey@currentanalysis.com.
Of the many malapropos attributed to Yogi Berra, my favorite is his logic-challenged description of a social venue that had fallen out of favor: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
That statement filled me with a sense of “deja vu all over again” following a recent string of meetings with European equipment vendors and carriers to discuss their IMS plans. One after the other spoke of IMS as if it were so yesterday, a mere passing fad that would make Paris Hilton’s popularity appear eternal in comparison. Then, one after another, each explained to me in great detail their future — and extensive — IMS strategies. As hype has given way to reservation, IMS has become a contradiction. Almost overnight, IMS has become simultaneously the Holy Grail and a hollow promise. The next big boon and the next major boondoggle. Paradise and parasite. Yogi would be proud.
It’s not too difficult to figure out what is happening here. Despite its introduction more than seven years ago, IMS blew into the staid and stable telecommunications landscape with the fury of a banana republic revolution. In the past 18 months or so, the architecture has been elevated in status from a rather obscure framework for mobile operators looking to offer IP services over their future data networks to a master plan to oversee the transformation of a carrier’s network, services and business infrastructures. IMS is not for the faint of heart.
Several reasons are responsible for the current pushback. At the top of the list, not surprisingly, is cost. Despite the fact that dramatic opex reduction is one of the major carrots of IMS, the implementation of the architecture is costly and complicated. As carriers and equipment vendors come to terms with financing IMS adoption or product development, sticker shock is inevitable. Suppliers both large and small recognize the profit they reap per subscriber is rapidly shrinking. Equipment that brought in more than $100 in profit per subscriber a few years ago now is worth roughly a tenth of that. Carrier-initiated pricing pressure will push that figure even lower in the future. Equipment makers rightly are asking the questions: “How will we make money selling IMS-based equipment? How will we make back our R&D investment?”
Competitive positioning is another reason carriers and vendors are dismissing IMS as superfluous (while at the same time moving heaven and earth to make it happen). Those that are downplaying it the hardest seem to be the ones who are the furthest behind, making them, of course, the vendors working the most feverishly to catch up. One equipment vendor spent a good percentage of a meeting letting me know that IMS from a practical business standpoint was a lark, an extravagance that was unnecessary to deliver the next generation of multimedia and telephony services. In the remaining portions of our meeting, the representative confided that the company was not only pursuing an aggressive IMS strategy, it had broadened the scope of its road map since the last time we spoke.
A third reason for the crisis of conviction around IMS is the popular notion that all of the bells and whistles that IMS promises to bring to new services — unified communications, presence integration, VoIP and IPTV — can be delivered with existing SIP and non-SIP technology. While those sentiments are true on the surface, IMS, if it lives up to its promise, will usher in a new world of converged services and functionality that will make today’s VoIP and multimedia offerings look prehistoric in comparison. In addition, as carriers consolidate and fixed and mobile entities unite under a single business plan, IMS is the only solution now available that can provide a core application and session control engine for virtually every type of access technology.
Personalization will be the standard by which service providers are measured in the near future. IMS provides carriers with service delivery flexibility that allows them to cater to both mainstream users and those with spectacularly specialized requirements. Stranded for a weekend in Paris during my recent business trip, I spent a Saturday afternoon shuttling between cemeteries and museums. While taking in the tomb of Jim Morrison and the Mona Lisa might not be that uncommon for boorish Americans over 40, I’m betting that few if any travel agencies offer packages built around those two tourist attractions. IMS, however, enables those types of “Doors-to-Da Vinci” pairings as a byproduct of the architecture — and without the carrier needing to dedicate disproportional resources toward seldom-used vertical offerings.
For me, IMS is to the telecommunications industry what the jet engine was to the airline industry. Sure, a modern airline essentially could reach the same destinations with a fleet of propeller-powered plans as it can with a fleet of jets — just as service providers can deliver services using only SIP or other IP applications and protocols. In both cases, however, there’s no comparison from a competitive standpoint.
While IMS appears to be taking some lumps lately and questions circulate around the staying power of the architecture, a not-so-wise-man once said: “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
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