IMS Forum Unlocks Power of Interoperable High-Value Multimedia Services

(Business News & Technology News, 28 Feb 2008)

The IMS Forum's fourth IMS Plugfest was expanded to include billing and OSS/BSS support for IMS. The plugfest is being held this week, February 25 to 29, 2008, at the University of New Hampshire, InterOperability Lab (UNH IOL) in Durham.

On February 28, the IMS Forum and the UNH IOL will hold an open house and round-table conference to allow IMS service providers, analysts, equipment vendors and system integrators to witness IMS Plugfest IV live. The open house will also include a live demonstration of IMS benchmarking. The Round Table will be moderated by Ronald Gruia, Principal Analyst, Emerging Telecoms at Frost and Sullivan.

Committed to deliver to service providers robust, interoperable IMS services, participants in Plugfest IV are working on interoperability for voice, video and multimedia applications, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), voice call continuity (VCC), femtocells, and on providing proper IMS test equipment, network robustness and protocol support for SIP and DIAMETER. Central to Plugfest IV is proving interoperability of IMS services for both the consumer and the enterprise unified-communication (UC) markets.

An important aspect of this testing is to define so-called "charging components," in other words, systems for rating and billing for service. "Seamless deployment of IMS applications with the charging components are critical to the commercial success of IMS architecture," says Ajay Gupta, Aricent Vice President of the Wireless, Convergence and Datacom business unit. "Our Plugfest IV participation with other members from the IMS industry would be a significant step in meeting the needs of equipment manufacturers and service providers for bringing in well-tested, seamlessly integrated, feature-rich IMS applications to market quickly."

"The level of IMS interoperability is growing rapidly, and, as a result, for Plugfest IV we are working with five test plans covering the IMS core network, core-class applications, messaging, fixed-mobile convergence, multimedia applications and charging," says Michael Khalilian, Chairman and President of IMS Forum, the industry's only association dedicated to interoperability and certification of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) applications and services.

The forum also announces that HP and Amdocs are participating for the first time in an IMS Forum plugfest. Many participants in preceding plugfest events also are part of Plugfest IV, such as Acision, Alpha Networks, Aricent, Data Connection, Empirix, Intel, Mavenir Systems, Mu Security, NextPoint Networks, Radvision, Shenick Network Systems, Sonus Networks, Starent Networks, Tekelec and UNH IOL.

Results of Plugfest IV will be revealed on March 18 at Spring VON.X 2008 in San Jose, California, USA.

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