IMS no panacea for service creation

The proof is in the IMS pudding

MCI is taking a different approach to adopting IP multimedia subsystem architecture than it has taken to other technology changes. The company has set up its own provability lab to look at different systems from different vendors and how they work together.

“We started seeing IMS really explode last November,” said David Croslin, IT chief product architect for MCI. “Suddenly, everyone was hopping on the IMS bandwagon. We are currently dealing with every major vendor on this.

“At MCI in the past, you go to a vendor, put out an RFP, and they all come back with their solutions and then you buy,” he said. “Our initiative is extremely different. We put together an almost 400-page RFI, put it out to 37 different vendors and then set up a provability lab and invited about 10 to 12 vendors in to prove out our design. And that's all we are doing there, we are not trying to certify vendors or interoperability.”

Once the lab process is complete, the company will go to an RFP and ask vendors to come back with their product offerings, Croslin said.

The provability lab gear was chosen for its IMS compliance and the openness of the systems.

“To be in the provability lab, you can't hide the interface between functions in one box; you have to expose them,” he added. “Vendors don't always like to do that. And functions all have to be readily identifiable by us — so they segment back to the original function that IMS defined, and they truly plug and play.”

MCI has multiple initiatives going on at the same time involving legacy products such as interactive voice response systems and contact centers that it wants to move into an IMS architecture so that resources can be shared going forward, Croslin said.

“We have already started to evolve those tools over IMS architecture,” he said. “We will come out with a pre-IMS implementation over the next few months, so they are ready to plug in.”

The equipment vendors involved in the lab deployment may or may not be the companies that MCI uses going forward, Croslin said. Those decisions will be made later, and will depend on how each vendor's technology has evolved during the time that MCI has been testing the IMS gear.

Although the company is driven both by the need to generate new revenues and the desire to reduce operating costs, MCI doesn't expect to deploy IMS immediately, simply because it isn't ready.

“We couldn't buy today if we wanted to, they are not to the point where we would get the solution we want,” he said. “The vendors we chose for the lab were the ones that were closest to the solution we are looking for. But that's not necessarily what we will deploy.”
— Carol Wilson