Not privy--and that's in American lingo, not British--to what actually is going on at this year's 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona now that the session doors have closed and keynote speeches begun, I must, in lieu of (and that's lieu, not loo) firsthand knowledge, make my own assumptions based on prior expectations and actual news emanating from the show floor. Turns out they're not the same.

Prior to the show, I checked out the brochure and was pleased to see that on the agenda there was but a single mention of IMS--and that was at the bottom of the page in the listing for a late-afternoon/final-day program called "All IP Networks and IMS."

Not that there's anything wrong with IMS--the architecture. It is the future. It's just that now that the marketing machines have commandeered the term itself, they've made it unreliable and vague. The exciting part of pre-show expectations, relatively speaking, was that there was a whole day's worth of programming dedicated to billing and OSS. Now that's a conference with its priorities in order.

You had Deutsche Telekom talking about cost-effective business processes. You had Globe Telecom and VoluBill talking about value-based pricing. Revenue assurance and service bundling were marquee topics along with seamless customer service. Convergys made the trek over to talk about single-bill strategies. Siemens and Intec tackled pre-paid and convergent billing. Telcordia, CEON, the TMF and Vodafone trumpeted OSS standards.

Maybe they all did what they went to 3GSM to do. Maybe they helped encourage the idea that OSS should be brought sooner rather than later into the process of whatever you might want to call this network and business transformation the industry is embarked upon. But by the headlines and press releases spilling out of the Fira de Barcelona, Montjuic, from software companies, IMS has dominated the discussion--even when the discussion is about billing.

The 3GPP standard for IMS leaves OSS and service delivery outside of the IMS architecture. Maybe that's where the OSS message should stay. By harping on their IMS capabilities, software companies run the risk of their messages slipping back into that tar pit of compliance, application interfaces and frameworks that no one but them can understand or appreciate. Their message should continue on the path some have taken over the last year in focusing on the business process improvements they enable and steering clear of the more recent trend of jumping on the IMS bandwagon.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@prismb2b.com.