While speaking at the Sylantro Global User’s Summit, I mentioned that I believed that the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) Architecture actually inhibited true innovation in services and applications that required voice. As I said it, I realized that I ought to give my reasons why I felt that way, if not for industry benefit, but for my own. Sylantro certainly has many tricks up its sleeve, including IMS, so I don’t want this to be seen as a criticism of Sylantro or its partners. Indeed, if I were the CTO of Sylantro, it would be folly for me to publicly denounce IMS, as many Sylantro customers and partners make public and private statements and commitments in support of the protocol. As it stands, however, I have no such responsibility, and I believe we need to look at the current state of the market in terms of application development, and how IMS looks in that light.
For those that are (luckily) unfamiliar with IMS, it is an architecture put forward by a consortium (actually a couple of them, I think) of large carriers and vendors designed to enable the mass deployment of media rich services and applications. IMS is a three tiered architecture, where the bottom layer represents physical layer components such as gateways, phones and soft clients. The middle layer contains switching and customer account control, and allows the architecture to play nice with VoIP and mobile networks. The top layer contains applications that add value. IMS solves critical problems for carriers, including how to charge roaming customers for applications provided by the home carrier, how to handle delivering the same service to differing endpoints, and how to expose a common application interface upwards. That said, IMS remains an architecture written by large vendors, to serve large carriers with large budgets. My take on IMS is that, if you printed out the standard and stood upon it, you would not be able to survive the fall.
Before we look at IMS, there’s an assumption which is important to state. My assumption is that innovation in service delivery is not essentially voice centric - it is application centric. In other words, we are approaching innovation exhaustion in how we route phone calls or take messages, and in contrast, we have not scratched the surface of blending voice into applications such as customer relationship management, disease management, entertainment or logistics. Extending applications using voice is interesting, and is ripe for innovation - but not because the voice portion is important. It is interesting because of the problem the application is solving, and how voice magnifies their ability to solve the particular problem. Of course, a corollary to this assumption is that voice is more valuable when the application it amplifies is more valuable.
This said, how does IMS stack up? I put it to you that IMS fails in the first primary requirement. If IMS exists to create an environment to support innovative services and applications, and innovative services and applications primarily come from non-telephony applications, then what does IMS do to support non-telephony applications? Is it reasonable to assume that a developer in a non-telephony application will chose to deploy an IMS infrastructure to do add telephony into it? I don’t believe they would, given the ready alternatives. They would go to a provider such as Jaduka or Evoca - not invest into the equipment themselves.
Would the developers even go the carriers? Not if they have to exist in an IMS environment. If carriers insisted that these application developers and providers integrate through an IMS method (Parlay), instead of a Web Services method (which they use), it would be an unnecessary burden for the developer. Maybe even a deal killer. Especially for something which is the spice, not the main ingredient. Until and unless carriers begin to provide architectures and interfaces (not to speak of cultures and business processes) which ease the adoption of voice by non-voice applications, then the carriers will continue down the road of lowered ARPU and commodity offerings.
In short, that is the basic reasoning behind my condemnation of IMS as an enabler for new service offerings. My hat is off to the carriers and large vendors, who have made a wonderful standard that enables these large carriers to deploy voice applications. But like the team of lumberjacks that sharpens their saw, cutting down trees at an amazing rate, the carriers have picked the wrong forrest to cut down.
Technorati Tags: IMS, Sylantro, telco mashups, thomas howe