New IMS Releases to Raise Confidence in the Reference Architecture, Spur Innovative Service and Business Models

By: Achmad Moeljadi Chadran, Consultant, and Leslie Arathoon, VP of Research, Pyramid Research
(Business News & Technology News, 23 Apr 2008)

Pyramid Research expects that IMS standards will reach a pivotal level of stability sometime in 2009. The slow progress is due largely to the issues that remain to be tackled and to the need to rationalize and consolidate the work previously conducted by multiple standards bodies in parallel. We also expect that Common IMS will delay the specification process, resulting either in completion schedules being revised or in specific functions, capabilities or techniques being pushed out.

IMS Release 7, expected by the end of 2008, will bring a set of specifications that should remain stable in terms of both standards and vendor implementations. This will provide IMS adoption with the first signs of momentum.

IMS Release 8, likely to be released in mid- to late 2009, will define service brokering architectures, UMA/GAN, Multimedia Priority Service and OAM&P support; it will also incorporate CableLabs' NGN specifications. Moreover, Release 8 will combine the agendas of 3GPP and ETSI TISPAN, and will specify several high-speed wireless data technologies, including GSM EDGE, HSPA, EVDO Revision C and mobile WiMAX (802.16e).

As IMS standards stabilize with these two releases, vendors will have at their disposal a much more actionable set of product requirements to build to, giving service providers more confidence in designing networks that can support both their immediate service needs and those of the future. These service needs, and the long-term strategies that underlie them, will ultimately drive IMS sales. This in turn will spur a wave of new products and product revisions between 2009 and 2010 that will remove the lion's share of the service providers' barriers to implementation.

The infrastructures now in use by the world's service providers contain a mix of circuit-switched voice systems, stovepiped and special-purpose data service platforms, and pre-IMS service delivery systems. Many of these systems remain serviceable and continue to generate revenue, so service providers will be motivated to keep them in their networks until operating costs, maintenance costs or opportunity costs change the business case. But service providers will start using IMS platforms to replace the systems in their product lines that are becoming outdated, and equipment in use at service providers does age and become obsolete, so service providers will start replacing it—with the new IMS platforms. As this happens, a growing percentage of their revenues will come from IMS-enabled services.

Based on this scenario, Pyramid Research forecasts the market for IMS service platforms, networking devices, software and hardware at the core, service/application and transport layers to grow from less than $500 million in 2007 to $31 billion in 2012.




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