The point is that carriers need to implement something that will provide the same kind of service guarantees that they have today in the PSTN & PLMN. They also recognise the need to evolve complex services in this environment and you are quite right in noting that large operators do not innovate well. This is where initiatives like the BT web 21 SDK are really interesting (which I know is not IMS based today!). Operators will expose network functionality to 3rd parties while retaining a slice of the action. The IMS provides a suitable framework to allow this kind of service exposure to happen.

I don’t think this is at odds with the web world in any way, far from it. The IMS allows the PSTN/PLMN to evolve to IP while also providing the basis for more open services. I don’t know what you mean by your walled garden comment, the IMS will exist in an environment of ubiquitous IP connectivity effectively bypassing any such walls.

Henry would be apoplectic if I suggested that IMS uses SIP for signaling. He’s a purist and, frankly, he gets apoplectic enough without me egging him on. He would feel, as many others would, that IMS intentionally sucked in SIP to bastardize it, to the large vendors benefit. I’m not so paranoid as all that.

I admit that I don’t have a better option for carriers, except to tell them not to invest in IMS, or if they do, to recognize that it’s all about large scale reduction of Capex and Opex, not new service creation. I even feel shaky with that view. (Read the above note). Many I speak with don’t like that particular piece of advice, especially representatives from large vendors.

All I know is that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen any sort of innovation from the carrier market, and the innovation I have seen from the Web world seems directly at odds with nearly everything that IMS represents.

Time will tell with all of this, and I’m happy to be the contrarian. Feel free to flip my bozo bit, I’m just trying to be honest.

Yes, I understand.

My exact questions to the operators of both greenfield and brownfield installations was precisely that: have you seen any capex or opex savings from your deployment of IMS. They said no. Then they gave me a look. I said no? They said “no”. Then we went back to our wine.

My contention about revenue growth is that nearly all value added service offerings provided by carriers fail, for a number of reasons. Some don’t, but it’s a really bad bet. Services such as caller ID, SMS and ring tones are few and far between, and the ones that are successful are easily replicated by competitors.

The real innovation seen in the last years come from smaller shops, developing in Web like ways and who are close to the customer – none of which are carrier attributes. I think you are exactly right about telco’s waking up, and the next gen SDP guys or the large Web concerns will stomp all over them.

I suppose I’m not a big fan of IMS, and I’m probably too biased against it. Maybe I’ll call my IMS Forum friends and listen one more time, as I refuse to read the 30k pages of the multiple standards again.

Thanks for writing back!

There is no longer any question in my mind as to whether IMS will reach the critical mass that it needs to be successful, I’d argue that it has already passed that point.

If you are an existing operator there is no other realistic option for evolving your network to all-IP. First generation softswitches will not cut it at the scale required by carrier networks, while also not providing critical features (like AGCF for example) and obviously such softswitches are entirely proprietary implementations (unlike IMS).

IMS is not closed or proprietary, it is certainly heavy-weight, but that should not be a criticism for a technology that will serve hundreds of millions of users. Arguably the SCIM is well positioned to provide the interface from IMS to SOA & WS. Again, not perfect, but the only game in town.

I assume your friend Henry knows that IMS uses SIP for signaling?

The overlooked beauty of IMS is the decoupling of session control from transport and access. This, along with SIP and IP, give Carriers some significant OPEX and CAPEX savings through network flattening, horizontalization and commoditization of components.

Revenue growth on the other hand, will be tied to service creation, and that I agree with you will in the long run come from SOA or web like approaches.

Unless telcoland wakes up soon, either 1) TEMs will find IBM, MSFT, BEA, Oracle or a host of others taking high-margin SDP positions in the network to do this, or 2) Google, Yahoo, MSFT or a host of others will wholesale disgusting proprietary or IMS/OMA/Parlay/TISPAN/etc services and again turn it into high-margin web opportunities, further disintermediating the Carriers.

JIm, I suppose I’d like to think this article is more than nonsense, as I wrote it. But you might be right and I might be full of crap – I’m never that sure of myself.

My biggest issue isn’t that I don’t understand what it promises, it’s just that I seriously doubt that it can deliver on what it promises, and for very specific technical and business reasons. My discussions with high level executives at very large telcos confirm my suspicions that no one is clearly reporting benefits by deploying IMS solutions, and no one is pretending that IMS has fundamental advantages over dedicated SIP networks. Indeed, as IMS increases its scope to cover even more functionality, it deepens the problems and increases the chances of its failure as an architecture.

My friend Henry would claim that SIP is the only game in town for large telcos moving to all IP. As a matter of fact, I often hear people accuse him of nonsense as well. At least I’m in good company.

Todd – yes, I agree, they could be complementary, but the web world will dominate the long term, furthering the demise of IMS as an important application platform. Just my two cents.

Exactly. The IMS offers the scalability, QoS and reliability required to offer large-scale communication services on wired & wireless IP networks. I fully expect to see web-services offered from carriers’ IMS cores.