Analysts do the math on IMS

Someone out there must like math because without it, there would be no math teachers. Nor would there be analysts to provide us with market research statistics. Regarding the wireless industry's IP multimedia subsystem, or IMS, evolution, we've been in dire need of the latter since the day — pick one around six months ago — that IMS became a household acronym. Luckily, a handful of consultancies are rushing to fill the need for IMS-related research. Last month, inCode Wireless released its latest IMS deployment matrix, showing which carriers around the world have announced IMS projects and how they're progressing.

Rob Prudhomme, IMS/Convergence Practice Lead at inCode Wireless, said that so far, many carriers are taking a best-of-breed approach to deploying IMS equipment, going with who they perceive is the best vendor for a specific IMS-compliant component. This doesn't necessarily mean end-to-end vendor infrastructure approaches will suffer.

“We have been seeing both approaches. The big infrastructure vendors are leading the market, and that's no surprise,” Prudhomme said. “[But] in the early going with IMS, most end-to-end vendors may not have all components in their end-to-end approach at an equal quality level. That could take some time. As a result, partnering between major vendors and start-ups may happen to fill early needs.”

Also, if carriers have one vendor's IMS-friendly components, such as media gateways, in their networks already, they are likely to leave those components in place and embrace a multi-vendor strategy to build the rest of the framework. Prudhomme said some carriers are guarding information for now about which vendors they are using to support specific aspects of their IMS deployments. In some cases, they still may be holding “bake-offs,” in which they call multiple vendors into their labs to evaluate their ability to launch certain IMS-based applications.

In addition to inCode, Venture Development Corp. recently did its part to help quantify the IMS market opportunity, releasing a research summary outlining the key product segments where IMS will have the most impact and suggesting that the sum of these market parts will amount to a $1.2 billion business opportunity next year. VDC's study, “IP Multimedia Subsystems For Wireline and Wireless Applications,” also forecasts that the market for IMS-related infrastructure and equipment will surpass $2.6 billion by 2008.

The research also identified key IMS product areas, including application servers; home subscriber servers; soft-switches with IMS components and functionality; and media servers supporting media resource functions.

“The market for IMS products is very real and emerging rapidly,” said Chad Hart, director of VDC's Telecom/Datacom Practice. “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.”

Global IMS Deployments