The outlook couldn't be brighter for the softswitch and media gateway market. Worldwide shipments of carrier-grade voice-over-IP solutions grew 100% in the first quarter of this year with softswitch and media gateway shipments reaching 31.5 million ports, bringing in about $627.8 million in sales, according to Dittberner & Associates. That's up 56% from the same quarter the year before. Softswitch sales led the charge.

Sonus Networks CEO Hassan Ahmed said exuberantly that the debate over VoIP is, well, over. “There is no doubt anymore. Everyone is committed to moving their networks to IP,” he said.

In fact, the market looks promising for anyone dealing in infrastructure for IMS. But ever since the Internet bubble burst, too much good news in the marketplace makes people nervous. So it's not surprising someone would come along and create consternation among the faithful. This time, that someone is Verizon Wireless, which recently introduced “Advances to IMS,” its plan for enhancements to the existing IMS standard.

There may be no cause for concern, as the advances put forth by the operator, along with Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Nortel Networks and Qualcomm, address valid concerns and shortcomings within the existing IMS standard. The concern comes from how they developed A-IMS outside of the traditional standards process.

Industry insiders who chose to speak off the record, preferring to give Verizon and company time to prove they mean what they say about their current outputs of the task force being a concept document and an architecture document that will be provided to industry leaders and ultimately become standards contributions, say they have seen this type of activity before. To them it has potential for impacting progress by causing a split in the industry at a time when collaboration would best serve everyone, including end users.

However, no one denied the validity of the group's technical argument. One vendor said, “There is no perfect standard and some of the items in A-IMS identify real issues, like security, which is one of the biggest problems in VoIP.”

Comprehensive security is the first bullet item in A-IMS. The second addresses another area of major concern, which is the uniform treatment of SIP-based and non-SIP-based applications. These areas are admittedly deficient, insiders said. Their concern? These issues are already being addressed by working groups within standards bodies such as 3GPP, ITU-T and T1-SPAN and that working around these groups, even though the players involved in A-IMS have plenty of voice within the standards bodies, “reeks of a service-provider driven, partisan vendor initiative,” one source said.

Others are less concerned and see this activity as a driver that will accelerate the work in the area of services — provided they bring their work back through the standards bodies as promised. “No one wants to lose the mindshare battle, but we are at a time where the players in the industry are better served collaborating to drive the standards that enable services, because then everyone wins,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed added that the new battleground over the next three to five years is in services rather than creating the network capability, which is a done deal. “And enabling next-generation services is really the focus on this A-IMS working group,” he said.

Ahmed acknowledges that while the work done on IMS within the standards bodies, of which Sonus has contributed, is commendable, standards are always evolving. “You can't write standards all at once; you do so in phases,” he said. “The initial phase typically relates to how the network gets built and how pieces interact. The second phase deals with using that network to do something interesting, which is services.”

That's the phase Sonus sees itself in. Having solidified its switch and gateway technologies, it moved onto services with the introduction in June 2005 of its IMX multimedia application platform. Ahmed said he and his company are excited that there is a task force that will drive the services dimension of the IMS standard. He said the group is trying to build on top of the existing standard rather than trying to change it.

But the question remains: Do we really need a separate group working on these issues? Detractors are saying that work done inside a standards body's working groups gets debated and refined through the process. Verizon says it will take its output back into the process, but plans to deploy A-IMS regardless.

As the standards process is a long one, some vendors don't expect much of an impact on their development plans. Ahmed said the upgrade path for Sonus is “pretty standard and pretty straightforward. It won't change as a result of the A-IMS initiative.

Nor will there be an immediate change at Convedia. “The A-IMS activity is good, but fundamentally won't change IMS in the short term. So I don't think it will be affecting anyone's development plans,” said Grant Henderson, co-founder and executive vice president of marketing and strategy at Convedia.

Henderson said that, in principle, A-IMS has a lot of validity because IMS is a work in progress, but he echoes the concern of others that efforts are being duplicated as they are already being addressed within the standards bodies and he said that the split in the wireless market between GSM and CDMA came about in the same way.

“I applaud the activity, provided the work is presented to the standards bodies as contributions,” Henderson said. “But I would be very concerned if these vendors, in fact, tried to create a fractional division away from IMS, because the beauty of IMS and the beauty of GSM is that they can — and should — be a truly global and unifying standard.”

He said a fractional effort would be counter-productive and would be unlikely to succeed given the momentum and broad support that service providers and network equipment manufacturers have thrown behind the 3GPP IMS. “However,” he said, “The people in these organizations are smart and I will take them at face value that this is truly a constructive attempt to move the body forward.”

If that's the case, their action could stoke the fires in an IMS-focused softswitch and media gateway market that already is heating up. In June, InStat Research said the global market for media gateways and Class 4 and Class 5 softswitches grew to $8.4 billion by 2010. That looks like the proverbial hockey stick when compared to revenue in 2005 of $2.7 million.

WORLDWIDE VOIP MARKET SHARE FOR Q106
(PORTS SHIPPED)

Q106 MEDIA GATEWAY RANKING

1. Huawei
2. Tekelec
3. Nortel
4. ZTE
5. Sonus

Q105 MEDIA GATEWAY RANKING

1. Tekelec
2. Nortel
3. Huawei
4. Sonus
5. Ericsson

Q106 SOFTSWITCH RANKING

1. Huawei
2. Nortel
3. Siemens
4. ZTE
5. Italtel

Q105 SOFTSWITCH RANKING

1. Nortel
2. Siemens
3. Italtel
4. Huawei
5. Sonus