Publishers Outlook

By Rich Tehrani (News - Alert)
In the next five years alone, IMS services should provide mobile operators with a $300 billion dollar revenue increase according to ABI Research (News - Alert). As mobile operators begin to engage in price wars with one another, it is essential that they look to IMS as a way to generate much-need profits.

This is great news for companies toiling in the IMS space these past years, waiting for it to take off. It seems the stars are now aligned properly to get service providers to explore every revenue generating opportunity the market has to offer.

And certainly IMS is at the top of the list as it allows partners to come up with novel services that service providers can sell to their customers, with everybody sharing in much-needed revenue streams.

The timing of this report titled IMS Core Networks: A Dynamic Service-Based Architecture could not have been better as we have gone through the hype cycle of IMS and are now at the point in the market where some have been questioning how successful IMS will indeed be.

The communications market went through two similar cycles in the mid-to-late 1990s and from 2001-2003. Then, within months, it seemed like the entire world decided IP communications was the only way to go.

I am not sure we will see the same thing happen with IMS but I have begun to hear more and more talk of interesting applications and services coming down the pike.

Sonus Upgrades Its IMS Core Architecture

To make IMS work perfectly, of course, network operators and infrastructure equipment vendors must strive to refine and debug the IMS infrastructure as it gets deployed, ensuring that the theoretical standards-based IMS realm is accurately realized by actual equipment and software based upon those standards. In that way, service providers won’t have any difficulty in hatching scores of advanced multimedia communications applications and services that meet the stringent scalability, reliability and security needs of large network operators.

Take Sonus Networks (News - Alert) (www.sonusnet.com), a preeminent supplier of service provider of IP-voice infrastructure solutions (their renowned softswitches can be found deployed throughout North America), and a company that took IMS seriously from Day 1. Indeed, their Sonus IMS SIP core has been deployed worldwide and serves as the foundation for the IMS Forum (News - Alert)’s interoperability PlugFest testing events since their inception some years ago.

Sonus recently made available the latest release of their IMS core architecture, including upgrades to its HSX Home Subscriber Server and SRX Call Session Control Function device. (Sonus’ SRX 2.0 is built on Linux and Service Availability Forum-based middleware to achieve super reliability, and functions as an authentication engine that tells the network which services belong on any particular session.) Sonus says their goal is to provide network operators with an IMS core network that will support the delivery of enhanced services to any end-user device, based on the user’s preference. Their latest release ensures that the IMS core network architecture is compliant with 3GPP Release 7 specifications.

The folks at Sonus also recognize that carriers are migrating to IMS at different rates of adoption, so their IMS core can integrate with whatever existing environment it encounters.

Vikram Saksena (News - Alert), Chief Technology Officer at Sonus, sums it up: “With today’s release, we’ve taken Sonus’ long history of leadership in SIP-based networks to the next step and added additional scalability and reliability components.”

As IMS continues to steadily seep through the world’s network infrastructure, users will begin to notice that their provider will be offering them more and more new and interesting services, at reasonable prices. IMS will revitalize how services are deployed for both wireless and wireline communications, and will give the average user capabilities undreamt of just a few years ago.

It just gets better and better.

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