IMS Forum's Fourth Plugfest to Focus on Triple Play, OSS/BSS and Billing in "Real World" Scenarios

(Business News & Technology News, 13 Dec 2007)

The IMS Forum, the industry's only association dedicated to IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) application and service interoperability and certification, has announced that their fourth IMS Plugfest will be held February 25-29, 2008, at the UNH InterOp Lab (IOL) in New Hampshire. Results of Plugfest IV will be revealed on March 18 at Spring VON.X 2008 in San Jose, CA.

IMS Forum Plugfests deliver interoperability for revenue generating applications and services. The theme of Plugfest IV is "IMS Triple Play, OSS/BSS and Billing Applications." IMS Forum members will test the interoperability of IMS applications and operational systems over a unified IMS network. These applications and OSS/BSS and billing services are available to all types of service providers including wireless, wireline and cable companies. A complete portfolio of services to be tested is being defined by the IMS Forum Interoperability and Testing Working Group. It will include VoIP services for consumer and enterprise users, various types of video services, Fixed-Mobile Converged services including support of femtocell, unified communications (UC) and interworking with IMS and operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS).

The IMS Forum also has announced the sponsors and participants registered to-date. Registration for Plugfest IV continues to be available online on the IMS Forum website. Intel is first to announce their Platinum Sponsorship for Plugfest IV. IMS Magazine and the Pulvermedia Inc. are the first media sponsors of the event. The initial list of Plugfest IV participants includes:

- Acision
- Apha Networks
- Data Connection
- Empirix
- HP
- Mavenir Systems
- Mu Security
- NextPoint Networks
- Radvision
- Sonus Networks
- Starent Networks
- Tekelec

"IMS Forum members and Plugfest participants have made a great deal of progress in moving the IMS industry forward in 2007," said Michael Khalilian, Chairman and President of the IMS Forum. "The level of interoperability between participating vendors has increased as previous Plugfests set up a fully interoperable networks running services and applications. We moved from testing IMS basic calls and IMS registration to full applications testing. The first three IMS Forum Plugfests successfully tested the interface for IMS applications servers and the Diameter protocol and demonstrated for the first time in the industry support of the AKA authentication mechanism in addition to SIP authentication. We look forward to adding billing and OSS/BSS to the mix of a rapidly increasing portfolio of triple play converged services over one single end-to-end network."

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