HONG KONG — The sometimes confusing picture that is the IP multimedia subsystem standard didn't get any clearer last week at the ITU Telecom World 2006 show in Hong Kong. Although the week opened with some strongly positive news by the Multi-Service Forum concerning the results of its Global MSF Interoperability tests of IMS, as the global trade show progressed, IMS quickly took a back seat to individual vendors' service delivery platform, or SDP, efforts.

Multiple software vendors, including HP, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, made SDP announcements that promised compatibility with IMS but also pledged to do more and mentioned the standard only in passing. Huawei was one of the few vendors to strike a strong IMS chord in Hong Kong, announcing the commercial availability of its IMS 3.0 solution, providing a standards-based approach to fixed/mobile convergence.

Part of the problem, said John Roese, Nortel Networks chief technology officer, is that although IMS set an industry focus on creating an abstraction layer between the network and the applications — as well as opening up application programming interfaces (APIs) so that developers can deliver new services and applications to generate more revenue — the return on investment of IMS gear itself may not have that much appeal.

“The challenge is, where are you going to make your money — on selling an IMS framework or on selling multiple applications that run on multiple networks — I think it's the latter,” he said.

Nortel is supporting IMS, and its equipment performed well in the MSF interoperability tests, Roese said. He believes IMS is still a necessary element in blended networks and applications and can provide the gateway to the service-oriented architectures that enterprises are now employing.

HP is making sure its SDP will work with IMS but doesn't want to be limited to what that architecture can offer, as it helps its customers blend their legacy networks and services with new capabilities such as presence, location and the ability to tie in policies, multiple access gateways and a diverse set of network elements needed to provide a wide variety of services, all linked with open APIs, said Marie-Paule Odini, HP's IMS SDP solutions manager.

The focus behind Microsoft's SDP is to bring to telecom the same kind of change it brought to Web services through Web 2.0., said Michael O'Hara, general manager of marketing for the communications sector at Microsoft. Its Telco 2.0 initiative includes SDP capabilities and more, such as a developers' initiative called the Connected Services Sandbox, which will let carriers, independent software vendors and others create new services and test them in a safe environment.

O'Hara admits the rash of SDP activity can be confusing, given the fact that each software vendor defines their SDP a little differently and offers a different view of how it all ties together with IMS.

“We see a lot of different disruptive forces out there today that telcos need to address so that they don't become just the transport medium,” O'Hara said. “That includes things like music distribution, companies like Skype and Vonage and YouTube. When we go to work with iTunes and IPTV, IMS doesn't matter. It's good for SIP-based real-time services, but there is much more out there than that.”

Much of what Telco 2.0 is about is “mash-ups” of capabilities, O'Hara said, and how to most efficiently accomplish that combination of network elements, back-office systems and new capabilities that yet-undeveloped new services will require.

That is very much what BT is doing with its 21CN project, said Paul Excell, chief of operations for the BT Group Technology Office. He also used the term mash-ups to describe what that company is hoping to do by bringing “all the power of Web 2.0 and the service-oriented architecture” to its new service portfolio. “We have a concept of multi-service capabilities — it's like the Periodic Table of chemical elements — and everything is built on combinations of that. Well, we've used the same concept but embedded multi-service within the network,” he said.

Based on the results of its GMI 2006 event earlier this fall, however, the MSF is saying this is exactly the wrong time for the industry to get distracted by other approaches to multi-service delivery and fail to make an all-out push to get IMS to live up to its full potential.

Those tests showed IMS “is ready for deployment now,” according to MSF President Roger Ward, a member of the chief technology officer's office at BT, and even the test organizers were surprised by the degree to which vendor interoperability is already working. GMI 2006 involved 18 months of planning, five host sites in four countries and five major practical test scenarios, Ward said. It included 150 test cases, 350 test runs and 879 pages of test specifications. Most of what GMI tested “worked right out of the box,” he said.

“IMS is far more advanced than we thought,” Ward said, in announcing the GMI results. “We were genuinely surprised by how well the tests went.”

One area of concern is authentication, which has too many competing solutions, and another was the lack of IMS terminals — tests were conducted using session initiation protocol (SIP) terminals, said Jim McEachern, carrier VoIP standards strategist for Nortel and MSF vice president.

The MSF also wants to look at the relationship between IMS and Web services and reach out to the companies working in that arena to explore a hybrid Web services/IMS architecture, McEachern said. Some initiatives in that arena have already taken place between companies such as Microsoft and BellSouth.

The one thing the MSF doesn't want to happen, Ward said, is any delay in moving IMS forward, either because service providers are deploying pre-IMS services or because of interoperability concerns.

“To take a pause now would be the wrong thing to do,” he said.