BSS/OSS Vendors Plug Into IMS Forum

Does that mean, service providers who haven’t already done so can begin the transition to IMS? Yes, said Tekelec’s Gavin Cato, vice president of strategic planning. “But the message to service providers is that IMS will be deployed over a period of time. Leveraging open standards allows you to evolve as your business demands,” he said.

Some people may be too eager, said Sridhar Ramachandran, CTO of NextPoint Networks. “The standards guys like to think that IMS stands for ‘It makes sense,’ but IMS is very complicated to implement,” he said. “We have already seen a lot of battle scars getting the basics to work and it will take a few more plugfests before we have a basic network that works.”

Basic, in this case, is still complex as Ramachandran refers to a “basic” end-to-end, multivendor, multi-carrier network. But the benefit to the industry is that when this basic network works, the ability to charge for the services running over it will be ready in parallel.

“Usually, no vendor includes OSS when they are doing marketing demos of new technology. They don’t care about billing for that,” said Manuel Vexler, board member at the IMS Forum. “But including billing and OSS at this point in the plugfest says that from a vendor point-of-view, they are getting to the point where their customers are asking what kind of operational support they can expect.”

The bottom line, said Scott Poretsky, IMS Forum Technical Co-Chair and director of Carrier Network Engineering at NextPoint, is that IMS is not about the technology anymore. “It’s about the services. We can talk IMS technology all we want, but it boils down to whether the services are available and is IMS the vehicle for delivering them profitably. With OSS/BSS we have a complete ecosystem that really shows IMS is the premier solution for delivering these services.”

Plugfest 5 will take place on June 2-6, at the IMS Lab at UNH-IOL. It will be called NGN Plugfest 5 or "NGN M-Play, OSS/BSS and Billing Applications" and will focus on OSS/BSS and interoperability for VoIP, fixed mobile convergence and femtocell, IPTV, video and multimedia applications for residential and business customers. And it will continue to evaluate unified communications, security, reliability, and robustness.