BellSouth is developing software that will knit together the IP multimedia subsystems architecture it is using to develop next-generation wireless and wireline services with the Web Services architecture it is increasingly using in its back-office operations.

First outlined in a speech at last week's VON show by Chief Architect Hank Kafka, the effort is an attempt to make better use of IT technology.

"We see the network world and the IT world coming together," BellSouth Chief Technology Officer Bill Smith said in a CTO panel at TelecomNext Monday morning. "So some elements of our IMS network will sit in our data center. This is the first time we have seen that degree of integration."

For about the last six months, BellSouth has brought together people from both the network and the IT sides of its operation to coordinate efforts, and has come up with what Kafka called "a middle of the middle" set of software requirements that will knit together IMS and Web Services.

"We had a number of contentious debates around service delivery," admitted Michael Bowling, vice president of convergence and platform development at BellSouth. "Both sides thought they could do it all. We decided we need to work together in developing a service delivery platform."

To do that, the company created a group with representation from both its network and IT sides and identified 13 separate functions that need to be worked on in a shared fashion, and then evaluated the current state of technology/development of each, Bowling said.

"We won't have each group develop these separately, we want to work in a coordinated fashion," he said. "So our group sits exactly in the middle. We see the tech trends, we define the capabilities and define the features--there will be several flavors of technology that develop and as a company, we want to pick one."

A primary goal of this effort is to be able to use off-the-shelf IT technology and to take advantage of what Web Services has accomplished in breaking Web applications down into discrete, reusable parts.

"Without that linkage between IMS and Web Services, you won't be able to compete with the Googles and Yahoos of the world," said Danny Briere, president of the TeleChoice consultancy. "Everyone is opening up their applications via Web Services and they don't want to wait for the telcos to build big monolithic applications that force them to change their internal software and processes to adopt."

AT&T, which is planning to merge with BellSouth, has its own effort, called COTS, to deploy off-the-shelf IT systems in its Project Lightspeed, working with IBM.

"Our effort is very much round not building custom operations, which are costly maintain," said AT&T CTO Chris Rice, in an interview Monday. "We know we need to reduce cycle time, and make it easier to get functionality into our network."

Given the need for shorter product introduction cycles and also shorter product shelf lives, telecom service providers can ill-afford to be building interfaces to their legacy billing systems and other OSSs, Rice said.