[December 2, 2004]

IMS: The Heart of Wireless and Wireline Convergence

Report From the Unstrung Insider

Service providers across the telecom industry are adopting variations on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) for 3G networks as they seek an unprecedented level of control over SIP-based applications running on converged networks, finds a new report from the subscription research service Unstrung Insider (http://www.unstrung.com/insider).

The report, “IMS: The Heart of Wireless & Wireline Convergence,” provides an overview of the components and concepts that make up the IMS architecture and assesses the features of IMS that make it attractive to operators. The second half of the report evaluates vendor positioning and strategies for introducing IMS across multiple types of customer.

"The idea of a standardized session control architecture for SIP-based services is becoming central to both wireless and wireline networks," says Unstrung Insider analyst Gabriel Brown, the report's author. "The market for core IMS elements, such as the Control Session Control Function and Home Subscriber Server, could easily be worth several hundreds of millions of dollars over the next few years."

According to the report, IMS is also a major strategic play that will "touch" many parts of an operator's next-generation service delivery infrastructure, providing additional revenue opportunities for IMS vendors with well-developed partnership programs.

Among the report's key findings:

• Motorola and Nokia look to hold an advantage in the mobile operator
  market due to their robust handset sales.
• Siemens, Ericsson, Lucent, and NEC have relatively well-developed IMS
  strategies; however, both Nortel and Alcatel are yet to announce
  commercial IMS products.
• The ability to integrate apps "end to end" between clients and
  applications, across the IMS core, is hugely important to vendors'
  ability to maximize revenues from SIP and IMS.
• Operators want open IMS systems and applications, but for now they
  prefer reliable, easy-to-use, single-vendor solutions over more complex
  multi-vendor efforts.
• A good proportion of IMS deals will flow to incumbent mobile packet
  core vendors, especially in the early days of IMS.
• Vendor partnerships at the services layer, combined with the ability to
  integrate third-party applications, will grow in importance over time.
• Toll-quality VOIP based on a SIP/IMS control layer is a huge challenge
  and will emerge more slowly than lightweight data applications such as
  messaging, presence, and video sharing