15 June 2011

Or so said Larry Baziw from Roger’s Communications at the IMS World Congress in Barcelona a couple of months ago. And, it seemed from the general air of positivity at the conference that this view was shared by most of the delegates. While many previous conferences had addressed issues such as “why IMS?” or “what’s the business case?” the consensus in 2011 is that IMS is really a done deal.

As we have commented before, it’s not really a case of choosing whether to deploy IMS or not; it’s just about the only game in town if you are a service provider with a significant subscriber base. More, it really has become the de facto next generation architecture – so issues like the business case are driven less by the potential revenue opportunities it may or may not facilitate than by the fact that legacy or incumbent solutions will need to be replaced in the coming years.

And therein lies the rub. Despite the relative success of IMS in achieving this position – and in our opinion, it does count as a success when we consider the cumulative number of announced deployments and the considerable energy expended by the gainsayers in recent years – it’s still not clear what new or incremental revenue opportunities IMS can actually deliver. Rather, it may be a case of plus ça change, as the IMS infrastructure simply works to preserve what’s there rather than being a true platform for innovation.