IMS is Ready for Prime-Time – but Only with New OSS Service
Management Infrastructures

By Brian Cappellani and Preston Gilmer

Vision vs Reality
IMS specifications lay the groundwork for delivering many different types of application IMS ( IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) ) promises to revolutionize the delivery and management of communications and content services — as well as dramatically enhance the customer experience. IMS makes it convenient and easy for service providers to mix and match services for consumers on-the-fly, regardless of how or where the consumer initiates an order.services over a common IP network infrastructure. However, they do not account for OSS service management requirements. IMS relies on data, trigger points and filter criteria that provide the basis for real-time activities. That information is managed in back-end systems that cannot support real-time demands, but have specific responsibilities that should not be interrupted or destabilized.

What’s needed is a solution that can orchestrate the provisioning of subscriber and service-related information into the real-time IMS environment without disrupting existing operations or calling for mass integration of back end systems and information models.

While IMS introduces exciting concepts like reusable service components and real-time service integration, it does not provide the tools to create them. IMS does not include specifications for service management or service integration. To realize its promises of faster, cheaper service creation and real time service delivery, IMS should be coupled with a centralized service management framework that can facilitate the integrated subscriber service creation, service componentization, and orchestration on which services — IMS or otherwise — will depend.

As operators begin to work with IMS, they are entering a complex environment with a range of network equipment and service platforms. IMS is supposed to be the glue that elegantly pulls all of these disparate technologies and platforms together. The reality, however, is that IMS is not designed to manage the multi-domain environment inside operator networks and data centers. IMS technology lives in the signaling control layer — not in the management plane — and its specifications do not deal with the operational or service management aspects of the services it is designed to deliver.

To remain competitive, operators need to be able to speed new services to market, while greatly reducing the cost to create and deliver those services.

Something’s Missing
IMS plays a critical role in pulling disparate service silos together, but it cannot do so alone. The HSS, for example, needs specific pieces of a customer profile to enable authentication and authorization. A CSCF needs information relating to provisioning and available network resources to perform its set up and delivery functions. Application Servers may need additional subscriber centric information that may not reside in an HSS.

What is needed is an OSS service management infrastructure (based on standards like WebServices, XML and SOA) that pulls together the disparate service elements, but also provides a unified and federated set of user profiles with visibility into the range of services each customer can use, and service attributes like presence and location. Further, the OSS needs to be capable of orchestrating business and operational processes related to service creation, authentication, entitlements, customer care, service upgrades, billing, and other business and operations functions. Note that these OSS related functional capabilities are not all housed in what the industry calls a “Service Delivery Platform (SDP)” today — an SDP is only part of an IMS architecture, and OSS service management must still be in place to manage SDPs and other application servers.

Many operators have existing legacy systems, but want to evolve to IMS. Rather than following a rip-and-replace strategy with OSS service management, operators should look at OSS solutions that leverage their existing network and newly added SDP/application server infrastructures, while giving them the full capabilities of IMS. This is the most cost-effective and efficient strategy.

Let’s All Play
OSS vendors have been using terms like Triple Play (News - Alert) , Quad Play, X-Play, Next Play and the like for some time now. But these solutions concepts do not address the full complexity and operational complexity in an IMS-enabled deployment. These solution concepts are missing the essence of what OSS service management is meant to provide: delivering and personalizing any communication/content service, on any consumer device, across any network technology and making these services available at any time, in any location.

“All Play” service management allows for service orchestration whereby reusable product/service assets can be logically assembled to produce bundled and converged service offerings. Rather than coding new delivery logic for every new service, All Play utilizes an open and meta-data driven subscriber information model, coupled with a flexible and configurable service catalog. Pre-configured service components are called or evoked to establish a network connection, enable a SIP-based subscriber device, call on an application, or request information (such as presence or location). By mixing and matching components, new services can be created — including the definition of their associated business and policy rules, service entitlements and visibility into the user’s identity — without having to redefine or hard code service logic on a one-off basis, as has been done traditionally.
Consumers are then able to order personalized, bundled services from anywhere — over-the-air, at retail, through the web self-care, by CSR over the phone, and so on — giving them maximum flexibility and convenience.

At Sigma Systems we have been pioneering OSS service management solutions for over a decade and, from the very beginning, adopted a philosophy of managing and understanding all communication services (at their core level) and bundling, packaging and integrating them across any access network technology.

Sigma’s All Play service management solutions allow operators to provide their customers with any subscribed, on-demand, event-based or real-time network or application service (e.g. voice, video, data, premium content, entertainment, information, SMS/IMS/unified messaging, push to talk & gaming), on any consumer device (e.g., TV, phone, PC, mobile, PDA), over any access network technology (e.g, HFC, DSL, FTTH, ETTH, WiFi (News - Alert), WiMax, 2-way satellite, 3G/4G wireless).

Having these capabilities managed in an All Play service management system not only helps speed service creation and makes delivery and management more consistent across disparate domains, but it also leverages the full power of IMS and helps to future-proof the operations environment. A technology and domain agnostic All Play service management capability helps maintain flexibility and minimize the impact of potential disruptive technology shifts in the future.

The Bottom Line
With All Play, operators can focus on their customers and on delivering the converged services they want. Services are no longer dependent on the network technology. They become universal assets that can be authorized, provisioned and activated for customers with the agility, flexibility and seamless mobility that operators require — and with the personalization and customization that consumers expect.

Brian Cappellani is the Chief Technology Officer and Preston Gilmer is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Sigma Systems (www.sigma-systems.com).