IMS deployments are slowing for the year even as interest in the architecture accelerates. But 2010 will be all about getting a move on, literally: carriers will turn to the architecture to support nomadic services.
And next year, after the economy rebounds, will see immense opportunity for IMS not just around enterprise fixed-mobile convergence, but also video, VoIP and femtocells/picocells. Cablecos and CDMA carriers will represent new pockets of opportunity beyond the core GSM carrier group. At least, that’s the word out of this week’s IMS/NGN Forum Plugfest 6.
To that end, Manuel Vexler, technical chair, said during a conference call that while the previous plugfest events focused heavily on vendor interoperability in one network, this one linked up two provider networks, demonstrating interoperability of user equipment and the ability to support services and billing across multiple networks; in other words, to demonstrate that IMS really does allow roaming of all services from provider to provider, whether wireline or wireless, IP or TDM.
“We are working with various customers at various levels of commitment,” said Acision’s Patrick Laurie, NGN/IMS Forum board member. ”We are seeing the immediate economic climate as a near-term hiccup. It hasn’t compromised carriers’ oral commitment to IMS, but they’re taking a phased approach, baby steps. Right now there’s immense interest in bridging the legacy and new networks, so legacy customers can use IMS services.”
This, of course, is the promise IMS has been making to the industry for the past two years. The architecture has been seen as an elegant way to rapidly create and deploy applications that can roam or be nomadic, regardless of access or core network type. And that is expected to create more revenue opportunities for carriers. This sixth plugfest finally is addressing the real-world requirements for making this actually happen, board members noted. Translation: We’re seeing real progress, not just hype, they noted.
“Voice is still the primary revenue generator out there,” said Vexler. “But once you have a network with the flexibility of IMS, it’s easy to start getting new revenue out of it. You can go home from work and access the exact same services there that you would at work; to the end user, it’s nothing but a cloud they can pull from on any compatible device.”
