IMS Forum: The Voice of IP Convergence

Dear NGN Forum colleagues,

Welcome to our first NGN Forum newsletter edition. With the increased competition in voice, entertainment and enterprise markets there is an urgent need for fixed, mobile and cable MSO service providers to partner with application development companies, digital content providers, enterprise and smart phone manufacturers, and financial institutions. As you know the IMS Forum and the NGN Forum recently announced their partnership to form the NGN Forum^™. By combining IMS, SIP, Unified Communications (UC) and Service Delivery Platforms (SDP), our organization unites developers, service providers, integrators and solutions providers to further NGN and IMS deployment. The NGN Forum is a pioneer in developing profitable business models for converged services targeting consumer and enterprise markets.

Our new organization enables our members to fully address the emergence of a single market comprised of information technology (IT), telecommunications, and media sectors that formerly operated in separate markets. The NGN Forum membership includes over 2000 executives, technical and marketing professionals across equipment vendors, solution providers, integrators, service providers, and governmental agencies. In addition, the NGN/IMS Forum also has created the industry’s first joint Venture Capital (VC) study group consisting of its members and over 20 venture capitalists, private equity groups and financial institutions.

The NGN/IMS Forum will continue to help our members to:

• identify new markets and develop executive level contacts with new customers
• reduce time-to-market by shortening integration cycles and test costs
• reduce the costs of technical training
• participate in NGN/IMS Forum open house and round tables in the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia
• gain exposure to financial and institutional investors

Our sixth NGN/IMS Plugfest^TM will be held January 12-16, 2009 at the InterOperability Lab (UNH IOL) in Durham, NH. The IMS Plugfests are the industry's only interoperability events covering NGN services over wireless, wireline and cable broadband. Plugfest 6 will focus on NGN Consumer and Enterprise Service Interoperability. It will test Ready to use IPTV, Diameter, IMS SIP, Security, UC Services and IP B/OSS. Plugfest 6 will continue to address the robustness, reliability and certification of key IMS SIP and Diameter interfaces as well as the following local and visited network services including:

• Inter and intra-domain NGN services routing
• Visited networks scenarios for Consumer and Enterprise customers
• Billing, charging and service creation/SDP for IMS and NGN
• Presence and location based services
• Interfaces operational testing (SIP-Gm, SIP-Mw, SIP-ISC, interface security profiles, Sh-Diameter and Cx-Diameter interfaces)
• Other services including SIP signaling compression and multiple profiles for public and private users
• Services including VoIP for residential and enterprise, Unified Communications, IPTV, FMC and other multimedia applications

NGN/IMS Forum Plugfests provide a hands-on environment to ensure that network operators have reliable, available and secure deployments of IMS architecture and NGN services free of costly downtime.

Since 2006 The IMS Forum has pioneered events that allow vendors to gather and rapidly push forward IMS and NGN initiatives that benefit the telecom industry. The NGN/IMS Forum has received some high profile coverage in the media recently in Billing & OSS World, Fierce VoIP, Light Reading, Telephony and TMC, among other publications on the announcement of our Plugfest 6 and the recent merger. For more details on press coverage is provided “In the News”.

We have already begun to plan some exciting activities for 2009 including the following:

• Technical working group papers and other activities for wireless, wireline and cable on:
  • Diameter
  • Service Delivery Platform (SDP)
  • IP video / IPTV
  • IP OSS/BSS (Billing/Charging/Security/Reliability)
  • Enterprise and Unified Communications (UC)

• Technical and business webinars
• NGN Marketing reports and ROI analyses of NGN/IMS services

In the coming year we plan to hold three Plugfests for NGN and IMS and to establish a Service Providers Advisory Board, and add additional test labs in the USA and overseas.

For online registration and info contact the forum at: info@NGNforum.org or visit www.NGNforum.org. NGN/IMS Forum membership and Plugfest participation is open to all companies.

We look forward to your continued and increased participation in all of the above activities.

According to a recent research report from Infonetics Research, worldwide revenue from service delivery platform (SDP) software and integration services will grow at a 23% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the 5 years from 2007 to 2011.

The report confirms that while many SDP vendors are struggling to define and position their SDP products, demand for them by mobile and fixed line service providers is escalating rapidly.

SDPs develop, provision, and deploy new subscriber services across wireline and wireless networks by combining discrete services into compound services, reducing the time it takes operators to integrate new services from 2 or 3 months to about 2 weeks.

“Service delivery platforms are fundamental to telcos’ futures. Without an upgrade to their service creation and provisioning process, telcos will quickly lose revenue to over-the-top Internet content providers like Google and Yahoo, making their enormous transport and access network upgrades obsolete. The demand for SDPs and outsourced integration efforts by major operators worldwide cannot be overstated,” said Jeff Heynen, directing analyst at Infonetics Research.

Other report highlights include the following findings:

• Fixed-line SDP revenue accounted for 16% of total SDP revenue in 2007; mobile SDP revenue accounted for 84%
• North America’s share of the SDP market will jump from 16% in 2007 to 25% in 2010
• In the short-term, operators will use SDPs to help streamline the creation and delivery of basic services, including VoIP, ringtones, and steaming video services, and later to create mashups that compete with services offered by "Web 2.0" ICPs
• Continued consolidation is expected in this space, with larger integrators snapping up smaller software players to round out their SDP offering and make them end-to-end
• Motorola's acquisition of Leapstone and Oracle's acquisition of BEA have major implications for both the software and systems integration sides of the SDP market

Infonetics’ SDP report provides worldwide and regional market size and revenue forecasts from 2007 to 2011 for SDP software, SDP integration services, and the combined SDP software and integration services market, split by fixed-line vs. mobile. Regions include North America, EMEA, Asia Pacific, and CALA. The report includes analysis of the SDP market, including an overview of SDP solutions, regional market drivers, and pertinent data from service provider research.

Please provide us with some background on your company?

Established in 1999, NE Technologies provides OSS and BSS software to communications service providers. The company also has a full portfolio of products in network management, ordering gateways and LNP. With the acquisition of Marben Products, NE Technologies enriched its product portfolio with a new set of products targeted at NGN and IMS networks. The Marben Products portfolio comprises products for signalling and routing of Next Generation Networks (High Bandwidth optical networks and carrier Ethernet). Marben Products provides portable, standards compliant software solutions to such telecom players as Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, Cisco, HP, Oracle.

What IMS and NGN services and products does your company offer?

MARBEN™Diameter is the line of Marben Products developed for the IMS Market. It is aimed at Equipment vendors, software publishers and system integrators and provides them with the Authentication and Accounting building block they require to insert any component into the IMS architecture.

How can the NGN/IMS Forum’s Plugfest benefit MARBEN and your customers?

The NGN/IMS Forum and its Plugfests are places of exchange and promotion of IMS. The Forum does a lot to promote the IMS technology and its benefits to all its members. It gives its members industry exposure and opportunities to advertise their technology and the solutions. The NGN/IMS Forum gathers complementing and competing players and unites them to put forward the IMS technology.

The primary goal of the NGN/IMS Forum Plugfests is to ensure that products are compliant to the standards and can interoperate. This helps us demonstrate the maturity of our products and the ease with which they can be integrated into customers’ networks. The continuously renewing and expanding scope of the Plugfest ensures that our products meet the current and future market requirements.

How does a verification and certification process aid the development of IMS interoperability/standards?

Standards are abstract pieces of work. They try to describe more precisely and formally how the IMS architecture is built and how its components shall behave and work together without giving strict implementation directives. Standard editors face the challenge of being rigorous and precise while not interfering with the implementation and being flexible enough to ensure standards will still be applicable to usage kinds not foreseen at their time of writing. This leaves some space for differences in interpretation and makes it easier to internetwork the various implementations.

The NGN/IMS Forum’s Plugfests are more than simply an interoperability test because the interoperability verification is done by the standards implementers themselves and not by an authority. They are live, heterogeneous test beds for the standards themselves. Plugfest participants share their views of the standards and best practices and can identify shortcomings, areas which need clarification, areas that are not covered, and areas that should be covered.

What has your membership in the NGN/IMS Forum accomplished for your company?

Our goal is to provide our customers with products that are compliant with the standards we implement. The NGN/IMS Forum’s Plugfests are of great help in this respect and their label gives our customers an established proof of this compliance. Participation in the NGN/IMS Forum Plugfests has also brought us different views of the IMS technologies and standards than the ones we have with our customers. Because the NGN/IMS Forum gathers actors covering the whole scope of IMS, it allowed us to share experience on common implementation and operational issues, and extend our knowledge to IMS areas that are complementary to our current product scope. It is a very enriching experience.

Who are some of MARBEN’s customers and what IMS services are they deploying?

Marben Products sells its IMS products OEM for integration in third party software. MARBEN™ Diameter can take place in any IMS node and we are not fully aware of all of the services and applications they are involved in. We see the most demand for billing/mediation and Service Delivery Platform services.

What are some areas of IMS where you have found challenges for operators?

• Wireless bandwidth may hamper deployment of attractive new services that are often bandwidth hungry.
• Migration from circuit switched networks and legacy SDPs to NGN and IMS is a challenge.
• Integration of IMS with OSS and BSS is critical for ensuring continuity of customer self provisioning and pre-paid real-time billing.
• The openness and flexibility of IMS architectures provides an opportunity for richer services and contents but grows the complexity and interoperability issues.

What are some of the key factors for IMS success in the industry?

IMS opens the telcom world to technologies used in the IT industry. This will bring down costs and enlarge the reservoir of developers for equipment and services. It will increase competition and bring the possibility of richer services to telco customers. Sooner or later new ideas for services will emerge and drive the adoption of IMS.

All IP core networks and the convergence of voice, data, wireless and fixed line services are also very important. Both these evolutions will lead to and require the delivery of services over an IP network independently of the access network. This is precisely what IMS is for.

To have your company considered for a profile in the Q & A section of this newsletter please contact the newsletter editor at pr@imsforum.org.

The technical community of the NGN/IMS Forum has been very busy. The integration of the IMS and NGN Forums has greatly expanded our coverage in the areas of interoperability testing, best practices and white papers.

We recently launched the Diameter Working Group lead by Bruno Deslandes from MARBEN Products. The group set to work right away to issue a draft test plan for Sh interface protocol compliance. The 6^th Plugfest event will take place on Jan 12-16, 2009. The team is meeting bi-weekly to discuss and develop the plan for this hallmark interoperability event. Our goals for Plugfest 6 include:

• SIP routing during CSCF load sharing
• SIP routing for inter-domain calling
• Visited network scenarios, HSS roaming
• Billing and charging functions, including inter-domain billing
• Gm Security profiles: (MD5/AKA) and (IPsec/TLS)
• Presence applications and Location-based services
• HSS to AS DIAMETER Sh interface testing
• More DNS integration for FQDN within SIP and DIAMETER
• SIP signaling enhancements (SIP GRUU, Sigcomp for presence)
• Signaling compression for presence SIP messages
• Multiple Public User IDs for a single Private User ID

Our members are hard at work on yet another project - defining the charter of the Service Delivery Platform (SDP) for consumer and business multimedia applications. Stay tuned…there is more to come. And last, but by far not least, we will soon announce our latest whitepaper, titled “Next Generation Policy System.” The paper, authored by Kushanava Laha, Aricent’s Chief Systems Engineer, presents how successful NGPS implementations can optimize network resources to deliver Next-Gen user experience across heterogeneous networks.

To take part in any of these actives, please contact Manuel Vexler, NGN/IMS Forum Technical Chair, at techchair@imsforum.org

The NGN/IMS Forum recently updated its IMS Report Card in conjunction with the UNH-IOL. This document uses data gathered during the Plugfests to update the industry on the readiness of IMS and to clear up industry misinformation and confusion. The IMS Report Card seeks to dispel confusion and misinformation regarding IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Next Generation Networks and Services to present a testament to the readiness of the technology. The purpose of the IMS Report Card is to provide factual information based on results from their 5 IMS Forum Plugfests conducted to date to clarify the state of IMS as a technology and framework. Each point in the Report Card’s matrix states a myth or misconception about IMS and provides data from the results of the NGN/IMS Forum Plugfests 1-5 to refute the myth. The myths fall into the following categories: Business Case, Complexity, IMS Core, Standards, Interoperability, Key Features SIP Integration, Standards, Applications, Deployment and Legacy Network. The Report Card also identifies areas that still need work, for example, IMS-based service uptime is critical to network operator revenue. It concludes that IMS is a demonstrably real technology with real vendors delivering real products and services today. To view a full copy of the report card click here.

NGN/IMS Forum executives spoke at the following conferences on the progress of NGN/IMS Forum and Plugfest Test activities and results in 2008:

• June 2008: Nextcomm 2008
• June: WiMAX Forum® Global Congress in Amsterdam
• September 2008: LA Internet Telephony Expo
• October 2008: CTIA
• November: IMS/SDP (informa) conference in Dallas

The NGN/IMS Forum’s active pace of speaking at and participating in upcoming industry events worldwide continues. See the NGN/IMS Forum at the following events:

• Feburary 2 - 4: Internet Telephony Expo, Miami, FL
• Feburary 16 - 19: GSMA, Barcelona, Spain
• March 2 – 5: CompTel/ASCENT Spring, Dallas, TX
• April 1 – 3: NCTA
• April 1 - 3: CTIA, Las Vegas, NV
• April 14 - 16: Billing & OSS World, Las Vegas, NV
• Jun. 8 – 11: Supercom09, Chicago, IL

The NGN/IMS Forum invites members to join its exclusive Speakers’ Bureau. Member companies have an excellent opportunity to gain visibility for their companies and senior executives while representing the NGN/IMS Forum at future trade shows and conferences. Simply contact us with a copy of the proposed speaker’s bio and indicate any specific IMS-related speaking topics and expertise. Speaking topic abstracts of one or two paragraphs are especially helpful.

9/18/08 TMC

Video Interview with Michael Khalilian, announcing the merger of the IMS and NGN Forums at the Internet Telephony Expo in Sept. of 2008

10/13/2008 Redmond Channel Partner Online

IMS/NGN Forum 'Plugfest' Eyes UC

10/1/2008 IMS Magazine

IMS NGN Forum Announcing their NGN M-play Plugfest 6 and Document Releases

10/14/2008 Telephony Online

IMS, NGN forums merge, reflecting IMS travails

10/14/2008 Billing & OSS World

IMS/NGN Forum Adds OSS as Plugfest Priority

10/14/2008 xchange Magazine

Plugging In to OSS at the NGN/IMS Forum

10/14/2008 TMCNet

NGN Forum Joins the IMS Forum® to Drive New Converged Telecommunications Services

10/14/2008 Lightreading

NGN, IMS Fora Wed

10/14/2008 The VOIP Mag

SPOTLIGHT: NGN joins IMS Forum

10/15/2008 FierceTelecom

New IMS/NGN Forum reflects reality of technology movement

10/15/2008 Telecom Paper

NGN Forum, IMS Forum agree merger

10/15/2008 Campus Technology

IMS/NGN Forum 'Plugfest' Eyes UC

10/17/2008 RCR Wireless

IMS, NGN forums team for ‘any to any’ communications

10/23/2008 Internet Telephony

NGN/IMS Forum to Hold Plugfest Six, Featuring VoIP, UC, IPTV on WiFi, WiMAX, Cable Networks

10/24/2008 TMCNET

NGN Forum Joins IMS Forum

10/27/2008 Telephony Online

Plugfests plug along, intercarrier focus up next

10/27/2008 Wireless and Mobile News

IMS Plugfests Set for January 12-16 2009

10/27/2008 Mobile News

IMS Plugfests Set for January 12-16 2009

11/6/2008 ReThink Wireless

Two ‘any over any’ IP forums merge

Recent NGN/IMS Forum press releases:

Attention members! We would like to inform the community about your company news. Simply send links to IMS-related news and announcements that appear on your Web site and we’ll place the links in this newsletter. Contact pr@pmsforum.org for more information.

The NGN/IMS Forum’s mission is to accelerate the interoperability of IMS applications and services, enabling enterprise and residential consumers to quickly benefit from the delivery of quadruple play voice, video, Internet and mobile services over broadband via cable, mobile and fixed networks.

IMS applications and services comprise residential VoIP, entertainment including IPTV and gaming, IP Centrex / IP PBX and unified communications for business including fixed-mobile converged services, videoconferencing and web-collaboration. IMS networks include DSL, Cable, GSM, UMTS, Wi-Fi and WiMAX implementations.

The NGN/IMS Forum Plugfests, typically held every 3 to 4 months, bring together dozens of industry-leading IMS vendors from around the world, all of whom build real, full-featured, IMS networks during the test event.

If you are interested in joining the NGN/IMS Forum, Plugfests or in participating in any of the working groups or marketing programs, please contact the NGN/IMS Forum.

All are invited to participate in the industry’s first open NGN/IMS Community where Forum members, those involved in various IMS working groups, the IMS Linkedin group, our industry and colleagues around the world can participate in active, mutually beneficial discussions. Take a moment to register now.

Our members are shaping the future of the NGN and IMS. Joining the NGN/IMS Forum enables members to:

• Verify and certify interoperability, reduce costs and accelerate time to market
• Participate in technical working groups focusing on service creation and applications for NGN/IMS architecture, framework and deployment issues
• Gain additional visibility through the NGN/IMS Forum's Speakers Bureau, public relations and marketing programs
• Showcase member companies at major telecom, cable, and wireless events in North America, Asia, and Europe
• Receive current market and technology information through newsletters, reports, white papers and conferences
• Gain access to an informed professional network of industry consultants and accredited experts