VDC: IMS market $2.6 billion-plus by 2008

Venture Development Corp., addressing a relative dearth of quantification of the market for IP multimedia subsystem-related infrastructure and equipment, has announced new research suggesting the opportunity will exceed $2.6 billion by 2008. The IMS standards movement continues to generate excitement from carriers sizing up the benefits of converged networks and applications, as well as from the vendors that hope to help them make the necessary architectural transition. VDC’s estimate of a compound annual growth rate of 67% from 2005 to 2008 would seem to back up the hype.

The latest research summary from VDC’s “IP Multimedia Subsystems For Wireline and Wireless Applications” also identified key IMS product areas, including application servers, home subscriber servers (HSS), softswitches with IMS components and functionality, and media servers supporting media resource functions (MRF).

"The market for IMS products is very real and emerging rapidly," said Chad Hart, director of VDC's Telecom/Datacom Practice, in a statement. "This emergence will continue because IMS is the universally accepted network standard--a standard that will likely be mandated by nearly every carrier deploying new infrastructure before the end of the decade. While this is an ideal situation for IMS vendors, this will be a difficult market to capture for the next few years. IMS products have a long way to go, and it will take time before carriers accept the IMS business case."

Initially, the IMS market will be dominated application servers, many of which do not need full IMS infrastructure to be deployed, according to VDC, while IMS softswitches and HSS will start to play a larger role as IMS networks mature. MRF products will have impact later, as IMS applications to play a larger role, VDC said.

VDC’s research stated that the IMS infrastructure market is worth about $561 million this year, close to $1.2 billion in 2006, and about $1.9 billion in 2007, before surpassing $2.6 billion in 2008.