IMS World Forum

01 June 2008

This year’s IMS World Forum in Paris was a huge success, both in terms of numbers of attendees and the quality of the presentations. Although many blogs have been filled with scepticism regarding IMS, it was interesting to note the generally positive view of the technology. At last, there was some realism in terms of likely deployment times, with a broad consensus that mass service rollout was unlikely until 2010 at the earliest. Marc LeClerc from Ericsson commented that perceptions of “internet time” were unrealistic for IMS and shouldn’t be applied to projections. Such unrealistic timeframes have been applied to IMS since the industry started to gather momentum in around 2005, but it is a mistake to apply the same model that was applied to the internet to something that is a fundamental change in telecoms and IT service delivery.

There was also a good deal of provoking analysis of the business case for IMS. We have been saying for a long time that IMS can only be justified by ROI from specific services and that a piecemeal approach to deployment may make sense. This seems to be a viewed shared by many, but what was particularly useful was that several operators reported on their motivation for supporting IMS and noted that the business case requires a specific number of services to make sense. Estimates ranged from 3 – 5 individual services, but the potential to provide an environment to support multiple services through a common service enablement architecture is finally being recognised. For more discussion of the forum, please visit our blog.