The IMS Forum is planning its fourth annual plugfest next month at the UNH InterOp Lab in New Hampshire and it’s planning a big change. For the first time, the event will include a new element: operations and business support systems.
Sometime in the next couple of weeks that forum also will announce a newly formed service provider advisory council. In addition to customer demand for new services, service providers have been pushing the forum to include a B/OSS component.
“We have heavy acceptance from the industry on IMS, but to actually do it, you have to be able to bill, manage and secure the networks and services. That it why it is more important than ever that we put a billing component and other OSSs into our plan of implementation,” said Michael Khalilian, chairman and president of the IMS Forum
The event will focus on the interoperability of triple play and quad play services across an end-to-end IMS network. Results from the event will be revealed at Spring VON in San Jose, Calif., in April. It will include testing for VoIP services for consumer and enterprise users, various types of video services, fixed mobile converged services including support of femtocell, unified communications and interworking with IMS and B/OSS.
HP and Amdocs are two of the major OSS players involved in the event. HP has been on the board of the IMS Forum for approximately one and a half years. Other participants include: Acision, Apha Networks, Data Connection, Empirix, Mavenir, Systems, Mu Security, NextPoint Networks, Radvision, Sonus Networks, Starent Networks and Tekelec.
“The plugfest is critical,” said Nigel Upton, general manager of BSS products for Communications, Media and Entertainment at HP. “HP and Amdocs are market leaders and if we can demonstrate to the industry that you can be IMS compliant with excellent performance and a low, total cost of ownership, that will drive operators to adopt.”
Upton cited Vodafone Spain as the type of company expressing interest in IMS compliance from its software vendors as it grows from 500 million call detail record per day to about 1 billion in the next 12 months. “The volume of traffic from data calls are massive compared to voice; they generate seven to 10 times the number of transactions,” he said.
Upton, who joined the IMS Forum board last quarter, added that service providers are growing frustrated with vendors who say they are IMS compliant, but fall apart during their proofs of concept.
“The plugfest gives us formal results that we can take back to places like the TM Forum and instead of talking about compliance, we can give people a new level of confidence,” he said.
