The blueprints for the much-hyped IP Multimedia Subsystems architecture have been drawn, plans have been made, dreams have hatched; nearly everything needed to be done has been done; everything but the implementation. This seems odd, especially when a few years ago, carriers spent a lot of energy talking up the benefits of IMS.
Now amid the silence, some are wondering, what’s the problem?
Well, let’s first take a look at what IMS was supposed to do. Peter Jarich, research director at Current Analysis, said IMS was a way for carriers to deliver IP-based applications in a more efficient manner.
“If you think about how applications are delivered today, the thing is there’s a lot in common, but it’s inefficient to replicate those things over and over again,” Jarich said. “IMS aggregates a lot of those commonalities.”
Basically, in increasingly complex networks, IMS was supposed to put everything together and make things run smoothly. Jarich said the IMS infrastructure was meant to let carriers get rid of the need to start from scratch every time they planned to launch a new application. IMS would create platform and layer apps on top of it, which Jarich said, in theory makes the process cheaper.
“[A carrier] can do more connections between applications, service velocity, can launch new applications, test them and you’re not going to do that if it costs a lot of money,” Jarich said. “Cost limits applications.”
Handset issues
IMS was on the horizon to save the day for networks and carrier facing complexity problems. However, IMS itself is complex, Jarrich noted.
David Withington, marketing director for applications business at Alcatel-Lucent, an IMS vendor, said the problem lies in handset limitations. “It’s difficult to get new communication features implemented in mobile phones because you need very open mobile phones,” Withington said. “It’s expensive and operators didn’t want to support specific software that had to be developed and supported on those environments and the return on investment was not enough to get it going.”
It boils down to this: carriers haven’t been ready for IMS, neither have their customers.
“Some of the applications that IMS vendors show off are really cool, but as an operator how do you bill for that, market that, are people ready for it, how do I get people these advanced applications and how do you make the case for the applications in the first place?” Jarich said.
The same page
Withington said the solution to that very issue and those questions lies in getting everyone on the same page. In the last six months, Withington said vendors, including Alcatel-Lucent, are providing rich communications suites, which are a very specific set of features to be implemented in phones. But the real kicker is getting operators and handset manufacturers to all on agree on this set of features and then agree to launch them.
“Historically these services are only successful when everyone has them,” Withington said. “The trick is IMS applications need to be exactly the same and [there needs to be] an ecosystem of handset manufacturers providing services across many phones. It’s more of an agreement between operators and how they’ll charge each other, interoperate and manage a whole business model as an industry rather than just relying on a company to launch a service independently.”
Hope floats
There may be a small, flickering light at the end of the tunnel. Ty Wang, senior director of product management at Oracle Corp., said carriers are beginning to slowly creep into the world of IMS, with small steps, and Wang credits it to the consolidation happening in the industry.
“Both smaller and bigger companies are wondering, ‘How do you acquire companies quickly?’ ” Wang said. “This will force them to apply a certain amount of discipline [when it comes to] what architecture to adopt as they adopt other companies and this points directly to IMS.”
A Current Analysis report by J. McGarvey also touched on the fact that IMS is inevitable, but carriers are taking it day by day, and adding the infrastructure slowly.
“Carriers must come to grips with the fact that IMS is too costly and complex to adopt in a wholesale manner and that the architecture will be adopted over the next few years in an incremental fashion,” McGarvey said.
Alcatel-Lucent has also stayed positive and confident in its IMS capabilities. Withington said the vendor has been signing new deals, working on implementations and investing in infrastructure and applications during the last six months. Alcatel-Lucent said it counts 30 customers that have fully deployed IMS and 60 that have deployed certain IMS applications. The vendor also signed a multi-year contract with Verizon Wireless to be the carrier’s primary network infrastructure supplier and said it’ll help grow Verizon Wireless’ existing portfolio of multimedia and data services.
So the process remains slow. From being popular two years ago to now being somewhat feared, IMS is still here; however it may be another few years before we hear of it making another bit of impact or implementation.
