What Happened to IMS?

Here are some notes I put together for a presentation that covered the current state of the IMS market.

IMS as part of the Hype Cycle

There has been a lot of speculation about the future of IMS, leading some to think IMS will never really take off. We think IMS is following a typical technology “hype cycle”. Gartner describes a typical hype cycle as starting with a technology trigger that leads to inflated expectations followed by a “trough of disillusionment” as the industry tries to commercialize. Eventually they figure it out leading to a “slope of enlightenment”.

The IMS buzz started in 2005 and really hit its peak in 2006 when everyone was talking about IMS. Well it seemed in 2007 that few people were buying IMS. As we’ll show in the next slide, this is changing as the industry starts to figure out how to make money with IMS.

IMS in 2008:

1. IMS standards are maturing alleviating standards ambiguity problems and making them more robust and practical to use. 3GPP R7 has been frozen and R8 is in progress.
2. Nearly every NEM has fully embraced IMS – you’ll notice most of them describing their products in terms of IMS, and some, like Sonus and Alcatel-Lucent are describing their products almost exclusively in IMS terms.
3. The industry is proving IMS works. In a few weeks we will participate in our 4th IMS Forum industry Plugfest, demonstrating multi-vendor IMS interoperability and new services on an IMS architecture. We will also participate in MSF GMI 2008 – another major industry event demonstrating multi-network interoperability among dozens of major vendors and several Tier 1 Service providers, including Verizon and BT.
4. Service Providers are buying IMS – in addition to the dozens of smaller-scale deployments (some vendors would claim upwards of a  100), several Tier 1 service providers will complete their evaluations and announcement major IMS contracts.