I recently did an interview with Daniele Tricarico of IMS Vision. Here are some excerpts from the article:
While interoperability is a core value, this situation makes it exceptionally hard to get vendors from diverse backgrounds and with conflicting commercial interests to interwork.
Chad Hart, Product Marketing Manager at Empirix, a US based testing, monitoring and performance solutions provider, believes that complexity and standards ambiguity are the greatest challenges for the true realisation of IMS. "The complexity of the IMS architecture is the main obstacle to real deployment together with standards ambiguity, even though the industry has come a long way in the last 2 to 3 years. On one hand we see consolidation with the operational convergence between 3GPP/3GPP2 and ETSI TISPAN but, on the other hand, standards are not always clear. For example, if we look at the status with VCC for fixed mobile convergence, it is clear that we don't really have a standardised blueprint on how to build an FMC network."
A considerable amount of testing activity has been recently conducted and initiatives such as the IMS Forum Plugfest and the Global MSF (MultiService Forum) Interoperability events (GMI) have been particularly successful. GMI for instance is focusing on providing a technical validation of the MSF Release 4 Architecture and supporting implementation agreements as the basis for interoperability between vendors within practical network deployments.
If testing and monitoring was not much of a concern in the early days, the tough reality of real world IMS implementation has put a renewed focus on equipment interoperability testing in recent years and as more operators move to live IMS networks, either partially or completely, network monitoring is the next challenge.
You can view the whole article here: http://www.informatm.com/newt/l/imsvision/viewarticle.html?artid=20017529071
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