“For Sonus, our moving from one particular type of product to a brand-new type is not really as significant or ‘watershed’ an event as for some of other vendors,” says Ahmed, “because they are moving from either their TDM infrastructure or hybrid approaches, to something that is brand new to them, something that’s natively IP and requires a ‘forklift upgrade’ to what was out there previously. So for them, the timing of this world transition to IMS is a very stark event, because it represents not selling any more of their old technology and selling primarily the new stuff. At Sonus, however, it’s more of a normal migration along the technological evolutionary path that we’ve anticipated for IP. That helps a great deal from a timing perspective.”
“We’re seeing customers expanding their deployments,” says Ahmed. “We’re seeing customers embarking on brand new deployments with Sonus, such as KDDI. It’s all about being able to do this in an IMS-ready infrastructure. It’s been a big plus for us to help these companies achieve fully IMS-based deployments in a fairly evolutionary manner.”
“The other big advantage both our customers and Sonus see as a result of this kind of IMS migration, has to do with the fact that since it is such an evolutionary step with us, all of this is being built atop solutions that are already field-hardened,” says Ahmed. “That makes it a very easy transition for us to make. In the IP voice industry, Sonus has lead market share in North America and Japan. We carry more than three times the amount of traffic than anyone else carries, on IP — over half a trillion minutes so far in the networks we’ve built. That in turn leads to a certain amount of field-hardened infrastructure that enables our customers to feel very comfortable in moving to a full IMS-based architecture.”
“So I would say that 2006 has been — and 2007 will continue to be — a time for establishing network infrastructure to be able to move to an IMS-based architecture for service delivery,” says Ahmed. “That’s true in the wireline networks as much as it is in the wireless networks that are starting to take hold. The wireless guys are probably a couple of years behind, which is ironic since IMS was an idea born out of the wireless infrastructure. But the wireline guys have adopted IMS more aggressively and really the difference is just that the wireline guys are further ahead on broadband deployment than are the wireless guys, who are just doing that right now, but the wireless guys have perhaps more interesting applications. Therein lies probably one of the most substantive factors around IMS deployment. Step back and ask yourself why operators want to adopt IMS. First let me draw an analogy. There was a very strong reason to move from TDM to IP, and hence from TDM to softswitching, and that’s what has driven the vast amount of penetration that we achieved in this space as an IP voice player. A big part of that was motivated by converging networks and, hence, saving costs.”
“If you think of that as the first really big step in the next-gen migration,” says Ahmed, “then IMS becomes the ‘next step’ in the ‘Next-Gen Migration’. It’s sort of the ‘next generation of the next generation’. The real force behind that migration comes from the ability to develop and deploy services. It’s about being able to deploy applications, features and services that are fundamentally different in the chain to the customer experience, and which run natively on IP. That is very much driven by the way that next-gen consumers communicate today, in a much richer fashion, using both voice and data. It’s also because we’re seeing an intense competition for the business of both consumers and enterprises, to try to sell more and more of the services that they buy. This all leads to a convergence not so much of networks but of services, and so the ability to get those features and services to the user is what really drives IMS adoption beyond the traditional view of softswitching. That’s where the real innovation and evolution of IMS will take place, and I think that will be a very vibrant topic over the next three or four years. This a long-term path, if you will, in terms of moving to an IP and IMS-based architecture.”
“We at Sonus continue to do rollouts, expand and win new networks,” says Ahmed. “We now have 57 customers around the globe. Our popularity is driven by the fact that operators can adopt a distributed IP next-gen architecture and move to IMS in a very seamless fashion. As long as it doesn’t appear to be a big watershed event to customers, they can spring forward. After all, just getting people onto IP is a big deal, but it helps to push the IMS migration along.”
“With IMS there’s the matter of dealing with formerly siloed applications,” says Ahmed. “It’s not just having to come up with more general ways of billing, it’s provisioning, and how you take information about a customer you already have and expand it so that an application can get access to that information and you don’t have to provision customer information in multiple locations and so forth. It does actually end up requiring a next-gen architecture just around billing and support systems. That sometimes turns out to be ‘the long pole in the tent’ — you can deploy the application, but man, it’s really hard to bill for it! At Sonus we’ve approached that problem by simply having been on IP to begin with, so we’re not encumbered by old models. Moreover, we’ve been able to do two things: First, we built a billing mediation capability that’s now deployed by a number of our customers that bridges the gap between the old and new worlds. Since that’s intimately a part of the Sonus infrastructure, it’s fully managed under the Sonus back-office systems, so, literally, if you can put an application in the network, you’re able to bill for it immediately because it’s part of an integration that’s already done.”
“The second thing we did resulted from our recognition that people want the ability to build and customize applications in a meaningful way instead of what was done in the past,” says Ahmed. “Here’s an analogy. We haven’t seen moSst service innovation come out of the older TDM voice world. Part of the reason for that is that the model for delivering any services has been closed, and that has made it difficult for an operator to innovate. You had to go back to your switch vendor to get them to implement things you wanted and it was a very expensive experience, so you didn’t do much. On the other hand, if you look at the Internet, it’s replete with interesting applications, because it’s so easy to do. Anybody can set up a web server with an IP connection, and put up any service you want. The challenge there is just letting the rest of the world know that you exist, so they can come and use your service.”
“What we’ve done is to work on a project that we call the IMX, which is really an application server,” says Ahmed. “And what’s neat about that is that it’s fully integrated in the back office system, so you don’t have to really think about what it means to provision and build, because it’s already built in, and so you can just focus on applications. The way that we’ve built this is that we’ve opened up the service model so that you can literally build an application in a couple of weeks and have it up and running. So now you can be innovative and try new things out, since now it doesn’t cost you a lot to innovate. You can test an application with a set of friendly customers, and if it looks like it’ll have a good ‘take rate’ you can deploy it more broadly and you can spend the marketing dollars that it takes to distribute it more broadly. What we’ve effectively done is to make it really easy to innovate and that’s part-and-parcel of what you’re able to do with an architecture that’s all integrated on IP.”
“Next year we’ll see some large IMS deployments,” says Ahmed. “The technology has proven itself over the years. The vast majority of the questions we used to get were about whether or not the technology would be scalable, deliver ‘five nines’ of reliability, have quality of service [QoS] and all that stuff. People were more concerned about whether we could make the network robust and successful. Since we’re now past that stage, what’s interesting is that the operators’ whole mindset has changed. They’re now saying, ‘I’m not afraid of this technology anymore. I know it works, therefore I am now excited about what I can do with it.’ That’s prompting more and more operators to jump in, make the technology decisions and start thinking about how to use it, to deliver new services.”
“In our case, the ‘dividing line’ if you will, in time, as to when to do IMS deployment, is not so clear, because, as I said, in our approach you just sort of migrate to it in a very seamless fashion,” says Ahmed. “The correct thing to measure is when exactly people start taking advantage of a distributed IP or IMS architecture to deliver new services. I think you’ll see a lot of that in 2007 and even more in 2008. We’re already seeing this with our customers. One of our customers in Japan, for example, has deployed the Sonus IMX platform to deliver new services on top of the Sonus infrastructure they had already deployed. So, that transition is very much at an early adopter stage right now, but I think you’ll see a lot more of it in 2007 and 2008.” 
Richard “Zippy” Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.
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