By Sivakumar Narayanaswamy, Senior Research Analyst

IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), new network architecture, is an open, standardized architecture for mobile and fixed services convergence that has been designed to give telecom operators options in delivering various services to their customers. It is a flexible system that enables service providers (SPs) to deliver convergent services like voice, video, data, and messaging to end-users with a consistent Quality of Service (QoS), usually better than legacy networks irrespective of the type of network they function in. Moreover, investing in IMS architecture enables service providers to manage complex services in terms of content handled as well as from a commercial view point.

Because of its capability to increase operator's average revenue per user (ARPU) while simultaneously reducing churn in a network, every major telecom industry player is currently looking at IMS with huge interest. In the value chain, the importance of IMS can be highlighted by the willingness of companies such as Siemens-Nokia beginning to offer IMS based systems rather than the legacy carriers. Companies like Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and many more in this technology space remain optimistic regarding growth opportunities for all-IP networks with IP routing, IMS, broadband access and transmission. Investment in these areas by the aforementioned companies is driven by the vision to be the first vendor to provide a single platform that combines fixed and mobile networks, which will offer service providers and carriers significant savings and new revenue opportunities.

The market is still in its nascent stage with the technical specifications still evolving. With IMS architecture deployment, service providers could gain significant revenue opportunities for converged services which provide end users with personalized multimedia services independent of the transport media. Also IMS essentially provides greater scope for scalability. In the current economic scenario, given the declining revenues in the voice services, the SPs look towards IMS for generating revenues and improve margins. IMS is well capable of delivering these applications as well as lead to the development of new applications by third-party application server vendors and independent software vendors, made easy by data and multimedia applications perfectly fitting in its scope. Some of the new innovative applications that were considered by SPs are Push-to-talk-over-Cellular (PoC), Video Telephony, Music, Social Networking, Television Voicemail /Caller Id and so on.

With IMS-based services requiring a mix of session, event, and subscription-based service pricing including revenue sharing with partners, the operators in this space need reliable test and monitoring solutions in order to meet the above challenges which will enable them to have flexibility in pricing the models. This introduction of new IMS network elements which is likely to result in moving away from the legacy mediation systems for implementation of converging and flexible mediation solutions is dependent on the ongoing evolution of networks and services over the next decade.

Investment in IMS architecture is starting to happen with SPs leading the way which in the short term is likely to streamline network architectures and result in the reduction of operational costs. This will result in reduction of operating expenses expansion and enable new competitive revenue opportunities associated with the growth in multimedia, content and FMC services. A recent example in this case, is Oracle Communications. After merging with BEA systems, it has added a tweak to its support in order to increase IMS deployments with its Oracle Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Partner Initiative. This initiative supported by a rapidly growing group of companies leverages Oracle SDP's open, standards-based execution environment to provide a multitude of standards-based solutions including a full range of network components, applications and services. The partner in this venture consists of independent software vendors, infrastructure vendors and system Integrators. The Oracle SDP Partner Initiative has already gained the support of more than 30 leading service delivery partners around the world such as FeedHenry, NewStep Networks and OptiMobile AB.

Moreover, with initial LTE deployments scheduled for 2010 and larger versions likely to follow in a couple of years, IMS is poised for tremendous growth. LTE's support for IP-based traffic with end-to-end Quality of service (QoS) augurs well for IMS. IMS's capability to evolve and fulfill various communication services like IP technology, rich multimedia features which include high-quality audio, video, and multimode communication will aid in the growth of this technology.

Chart 1.1 shows some of the applications that are enabled by the IMS architecture implementation in the wireline and wireless networks.

Irrespective of the worldwide economic crisis, the sale of IMS equipments and servers in 2008 from 2007 was estimated to have grown at 'explosive' growth rates of >80 per cent. The technical and commercial evolution of IMS also has ensured that IMS adoption continues to increase. This is expected, because it enables implementation of communications services delivering enriched content to customers with many revenue generating applications. With many service providers like Alactel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens and others showing intent to deploy new IMS architecture in their networks, the IMS equipment market expected to grow in the next couple of years unlike many other markets. This augurs well for the test and monitoring equipment vendors in the IMS space promising greater long term growth potential.