Forum Sets Record Straight: IMS Is Here to Stay

Based in part on the success of its latest interoperability events known as plugfests and in part by signs that vendors and service providers continue to move toward an IP Multimedia Subsystem architecture — whether they call it that or not — the IMS NGN Forum’s Report Card this week says IMS is overcoming the hype and misinformation that made it appear to have stalled.

It hasn’t, said Manuel Vexler, chair of IMS Technical Working Groups. “Developing standards in telecom always seems to take longer than we want it to take,” he said. “But there is definitely a migration toward IMS architectures in the vendor community that is better than expected and moving at a fairly good clip.”

Vexler said that in a way, the current economic situation may move things along even faster. “It forces people to have to make decisions,” he said. Besides, Vexler added, “There are not many standards out there besides IMS that are so well understood or have the resources behind it.”

Many of those resources come together a couple of times per year to participate in the IMS NGN Forum’s Plugfest Interoperability events and from that, the forum has developed its second report card for the industry. The document seeks to “dispel confusion and misinformation regarding IMS and NGN and present a true testament ... as to the readiness of the technology.”

Despite the assertion by Michael Khalilian, chairman and president of the IMS Forum, that it is not the forum’s job to change public opinion, there is too much conflicting information about the technology. “We are a standards group whose job it is push the technology forward and to identify areas of improvement in the protocols and interaction. We are here to provide facts about what is real and what it will take to reach the ultimate goal,” he said.

Khalilian added that ultimately the consumer will change opinion through the growth in demand for more applications. In the meantime, he said, we are moving forward with the ultimate IMS architecture of the quad play.

Much of the early hype — that not generated by the press — was generated by vendors claiming IMS functionality in their products. The forum’s plugfest events are designed to verify that functionality in a multivendor environment. In its report card, the forum said, “The five plugfests that have taken place since January of 2007 have proved what before were only concepts and yielded a number of ‘proof points’ for the health and readiness of IMS-based services deployments.”

The next plugfest, IMS Plugfest 6, will take place in January and will test IMS-based conferencing applications and a PC-based iPhone application across multivendor, multicarrier networks. This event also will be expanded to include global locations in addition to its home location at the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab.

The results of the completed plugfests have been compiled in the forum’s report card in order to capture proof points for the industry to get a better sense of the progress of the IMS architecture. You can see all the proof points on the IMS Forum Web site, but some of the latest highlights include the proof of IMS-ready applications and the billing and charging systems needed to monetize them.

Plugfests 4 and 5 incorporated these components thanks to solutions from HP and Amdocs.

“We are the only organization in the industry that put the importance of BSS and OSS on [the same level] as the apps bringing in the revenue,” Khalilian said. “We basically told the industry that we believe BSS/OSS is one of the main components in this new era of the quad play and IMS architecture. Traditionally, service providers did not work on this in parallel with the network architecture.”

Other dispelled myths in the report card address the supposed immaturity of the standard, the level of complexity, interoperability issues, a lack of business cases and key features, protocol incompatibility (especially with SIP), and a lack of security.

Overall, the plugfests have shown, according to the forum, that NGN convergence is happening piece-by-piece and that service providers can, and are, implementing IMS on a per-service basis. The IMS architecture continues to evolve “from the inside out,” meaning it starts with individual applications at the core services layer and grows from there, until eventually there will exist a common foundation for all services.

In future plugfests, the forum will focus on reliability, security, billing and roaming issues as well as continuing its incorporation of back-office functionality. It is also working on a certification program that will create even greater confidence in vendor’s claims of interoperability.