As a tribute to the recently deceased Arthur C. Clarke, please indulge a slight detour into science fiction to better emphasize the thesis of this column.

Imagine for a moment that the recent and spectacular downing of a malfunctioning satellite by U.S. Navy-launched missiles had an unintended consequence. Fuel from the orbiting satellite was subjected to a strange chemical alteration as if fell through the earth’s atmosphere, creating a gaseous compound that altered the physiological systems of human life forms in one manner – doubling the gestation period of the female of the species.

After the expected wave of hysteria subsided and scientists had determined that the only ill-effect of the incident was an elongated pregnancy, humans -- known around the galaxy for their pragmatism, resiliency and bizarre political nominating rituals – quickly adjusted. Sociologists and other experts immediately recalculated world population estimates and the likely impact on food supplies, oil consumption and the rate of global warming. And before the offending gas had even dissipated, opportunists and entrepreneurs were figuring out ways to exploit the situation financially. Global industries and cottage industries alike were transformed and created as a result of the sudden disruption of a timetable that had been static and predictable since prehistoric times.

The fashion industry seized on the fact that women would be more willing to shell out for an expensive wardrobe, since clothing investments could now be stretched out over 18 months instead of just nine. Spas and health clubs launched programs geared at keeping expectant mothers comfortable and in shape. And the publishing industry capitalized on the situation by releasing new additions of nearly every pre-natal tomb on book shelves. “What to Expect When You’re Expecting: The 18-Month Edition” became an instant bestseller.

While such a scenario is thankfully outside the realm of reality, a similar situation is taking place – on a metaphorical realm, of course -- in the telecommunications industry. Less than two years ago, equipment makers and carriers proudly announced the impending arrival of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture. Cigars with circulated, birth announcements distributed. The only problem was that equipment makers and pundits failed to correctly calculate the length of time it would take the IMS-bearing stork to reach its destination. Similar to expectant parents in our science fiction scenario, the telecommunications industry is confronted with the situation that the delivery of IMS is a certainty – nurseries have been furnished and names picked out – but the due date keeps getting pushed back.

The delay, it turns out, is creating new opportunities and lengthening old ones for telecommunications equipment providers. The biggest beneficiaries of a protracted IMS adoption are vendors that specialize in service mediation or protocol translation technology. These players, mostly makers of gateway devices or application environments, are attracting new interest from service providers and operators that have come to the realization that subscribers are growing hungry for new and compelling services and functionality and that the “delicate” state of IMS means they need to find alternatives ways to satisfy that subscriber hunger.

This situation has significantly improved the fortunes of companies, such as Convergin, which specializes in service orchestration and recently introduced technology that will enable developers to fuse legacy telephony features and services into Web-based applications. While this approach requires the deployment of SIP application servers, it does not rely on the adoption of an IMS-based architecture.

Wringing additional value out of Intelligent Network (IN) applications is the special sauce that OpenCloud brings to the “What to Do When You’re Expecting IMS” party. Using the company’s programming environment, which bridges next-gen and IN, service providers have the opportunity to innovate around services that have been static for decades and to quickly draw new life out of a services development environment that traditionally requires six months to a year to produce a single application.

Tekelec, which is looking to furnish service providers with new tools and infrastructure gear for scaling and managing softswitch-based networks as they are transitioned to IMS, suddenly sees its window of opportunity widen by at least a year or two. While operators would normally be loathe to invest in a transitory infrastructure, the extended gestation period of IMS now means that NGN/softswitch environments will need to scale to much greater proportions than operators believed would be necessary a year or two ago.

While it seems apt at this point to evoke the cliché that it’s sometimes more advantages to be lucky than it is to be good, it doesn’t really apply to this situation and to these and other vendors. Despite all the pie-in-the-sky hype around IMS being the foundation upon which operators would construct a single service delivery architecture, most service providers understood that they would need to rely on revenue from services from legacy environment for quite some time. As a result, multiple equipment makers recognized the need for service mediation and orchestration technology that would enable service providers to cap investment in legacy and often-proprietary service domains, while at the same time continuing to offer subscribers familiar services. Where the luck, comes in, it could be argued, is that these vendors may not have guessed that the IMS adoption cycle would be as long as it’s turning out to be. For these players, whose fortunes increase in proportion to IMS’s postponement, the longer this particular bundle of joy is delayed, the better.

Joe McGarvey is principal analyst for Current Analysis.