The IP multimedia subsystem, or IMS, exploded onto the telecom industry scene earlier this year with the force of a thousand press releases behind it, as though the concept had been pent up for years waiting for its turn to imbed itself and its associated acronym into the telecom lexicon. Suddenly and without warning, everyone was talking about IMS, leaving the slower industry observers among us scrambling to figure out what it was, what the heck it did and--ever-important in questions of technology--what it was intended to replace.

IMS mania hit a high point at Supercomm 2005 in June, the unofficial coming out party of sorts for IMS. That show marked the first time since we all learned to string those three letters together that the industry gathered in one place to talk about it: the architecture vendors (most of which, of course, had been developing leading IMS strategies for some time), the applications developers (ditto) and the carriers (the only leg of the IMS troika willing to admit they weren't quite ready to commit to IMS). Even at that big event where IMS was much discussed, however, there was little in the way of new IMS architectures or deployments announced.

But it would appear that those days of a framework without backup are fading into the background. A recent study from Venture Development Corp. is among the first third-party research efforts to explore the real market opportunity for IMS, and the results are as impressive as the buildup made us think it would be. VDC estimates that IMS will be a $2.6 billion market as early as 2008, and goes into deep detail on the challenges that exist for both developers of IMS technology and carriers that stand to gain from its convergence-friendly benefits.

We at Telephony--ever in support of promising technology trends that are proved out by real market opportunity--are doing are part to contribute to the advancement of IMS with a One-Stop on our Web site devoted to coverage of its evolving eminence in the carrier convergence realm. We're also the platinum media sponsors of FMC Live, an IMS technology and business summit that will be held in Chicago, Oct. 5-6.

The infancy of IMS has been busy indeed. It will be interesting to track the technology into what promises to be an accelerated adulthood to see if the architecture lives up to its potential.

E-mail me at jmeyers@primediabusiness.com.