The wireless industry has a new acronym to beat to death. It's called IMS--IP multimedia subsystem--and the vendors are bringing down the bat hard at the 3GSM World Congress.

The way the vendors talk about it, some 200 carriers are already in trials or in the early stages of deployment, though only a handful of carriers have actually revealed any IMS plans whatsoever. That hasn't stopped the vendor community from releasing a barrage of new IMS products and announcing just as many new partnerships at the show.

Nortel probably took the 3GSM equivalent of the Palm D'Or, announcing that IBM has selected its IMS solution as the technology platform for its new converged multimedia effort. Oddly, Nortel claims to already have a boatload of unnamed carriers either poking at its architecture or committed to a commercial launch even though the vendor wasn't considered an initial leader in IMS.

Surprisingly, Nokia--which is usually named at the top of the list when such IMS lists are arbitrarily composed by us journalist types--was awfully quiet on IMS at the show. Nokia stole a lot of attention by announcing a music partnership with would-be rival Microsoft, and the Series 60 group committed to make the smartphone plebian. Lucent took every opportunity to point out it still had the most significant win on the books, Sprint. And Ericsson debuted on the IMS scene with not one, but two IMS contracts.

So let this be foreshadowing. If IMS is knocking this loudly at 3GSM, it's sure to be a major factor at CTIA 2005 next month. So get out your telecom dictionaries and be prepared to talk about SIP and session control function and HSS and distributed intelligent gateways. They may be getting the first cracks at IMS in France, but we can still have a few swings with the bat.

Contact me at kfitchard@primediabusiness.com.