Reality Check

By Richard "Zippy" Grigonis          

Yours Truly is still mulling over the Yankee Group’s (News - Alert) November 2006 report,“IMS Architecture: Time for Introspection and Reality Check”.

The good news is that carriers and vendors practically take for granted that IMS will be the single, unifying service architecture for the world’s wireless and wireline networks. Everyone likes the idea partly because it leads to fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), which means you can roam about with all of your services.Moreover, IMS is modularized in such as way that one can create lots of new services quickly, yet a network operator can both leverage a legacy infrastructure and maintain a consistent user experience.

The bad news is that constructing the whole humongous IMS/next-gen edifice is not without some peril.The carriers’ trepidations are based on a number of reasons, as specified by the Yankee Group’s report:

• Standard compliance for vendors: vendors’ solutions are still not fully standard-compliant.

• Vendor solution interoperability: there are immature standards and a lack of vendor solution interoperability.

• Support for Service Initiation Protocol (SIP)- and non-SIP-based services: adoption of SIP
is a new requirement.

• Service orchestration: orchestration functionality is critical, but lacks a proper standards definition.

“The promises of IMS architecture for carriers and service providers can be truly mind-boggling. Beneath all the academics and hype, the road to IMS and next-generation architecture is rocky and treacherous,” said Arindam Banerjee,Yankee Group senior analyst.“An aggressive approach to IMS has a greater chance of failing. A slower and more cautious path to IMS will help reduce uncertainty and provide greater architectural stability, which will subsequently result in increased APRU and improved
customer stickiness.”

For IMS to be successful, the report says that “gaping holes and inadequacies in the architecture that have surfaced must be addressed by vendors and carriers.”

Over here at IMS Magazine, of course, we’re inclined to yell,“Yankee Go Home!”.Admittedly, we’re of the opinion that IMS may just be getting out of the lab and is still a bit wet around the ears, but whenever somebody thinks that there’s a buck to be made in a new technology such as IMS, then you’ll soon be surprised at how quickly any problems get ironed out. Unlike social issues, technology is one of those few areas where you can indeed throw money at problems and get results, provided that you
haven’t outsourced your R&D to Outer Mongolia.

The science writer Willy Ley once wrote that if an eccentric billionaire had wanted to go into orbit in 1910, he could have done it.All of the technological components were there (liquefaction of hydrogen and oxygen, trajectory mathematics, air-tight suits, etc.). It just would have taken an additional research program (and a heap of money) to pull all of it together into a manned spaceflight.Historically, however, it didn’t happen until 1961, mostly because just about everyone (at least everyone who
controlled the purse strings) lacked the will to do so. Contrast that with the development of the more improbable atomic bomb, which went from an obscure scientific paper on fission to an actual bomb after just six years, thanks to a $2 billion expenditure and a group of scientists working like crazy.

Moral of the story: Everyone recognizes that IMS is the future of world communications.As time goes on, some reality checks will occur and the difficulties will be ironed out. It may not be cheap to do so, but “inevitability” rarely is.

Postscript: A new column starts in this issue, written by David Hayward of Reef Point Systems. It’s name: IMS Reality Check.

Now there’s a coincidence for you.