The big carriers are charging ahead with their IMS implementations. They have even named some of their preferred providers, at least on the infrastructure side. OSS vendors are standing to the side waiting their turn like shy kids at a high school dance. But they’re not just standing there hiding their zits, they’re rehearsing their moves.

A dozen high-profile telecom executives could be quoted as saying, “IMS can’t succeed without the support of OSS.” Lucent’s chief strategy officer, Janet Davidson’s version goes something like this: “IMS cannot happen unless we bring along the systems that support it.”

Still, said Dave Gorton, executive director of IMS service delivery product strategy for Telcordia, “For people on the services side or the network side, OSS is still somewhat of an afterthought.”

That’s not unusual. Look at any major network transformation; it’s necessarily all about the hardware. Operations support systems and business supports systems (OSS/BSS) are important. It’s just that their importance isn’t required in IMS until service providers are ready to start running advanced services across their IMS networks.

That’s where Telcordia is beginning to see some action with its Service Director product, which could be considered more of an application layer solution than OSS, but nonetheless is a foot in the IMS door for the biggest OSS player in the land as infrastructure leads to applications which leads to OSS/BSS.

“Everyone understands OSS will play a role in IMS,” said Bo Atwater, chief architect and executive director at Telcordia. “Anyone who looks at rolling out new services immediately starts tying in issues like settlement and billing.”

Mobile operators are further upfield than their landline counterparts because their advanced services are already being rolled out. And along with the rating and charging activities required, those operators are also looking at new service assurance solutions. But Atwater has a good explanation for why more OSS has not been included earlier on in the transformational migration to IMS.

“A lot of companies don’t want their operations supports systems limited to an IMS silo,” he said. “Because not everything will be on IMS.”

In this week's feature story on IMS, analysts at Venture Development Corp. provide a measuring stick for the various stages of IMS adoption. From this it is easy to see that it will be a long time before the bulk of services are on IMS. And service providers are not eager to deploy separate OSS platforms.

Eager or not, IMS infrastructure changes will force carriers to consider the OSS implications. “IMS has made service providers focus on the processes required to get services to customers, and they have found those processes inadequate and that presents a good opportunity for Telcordia,” Atwater said.

It may or may not be as good of an opportunity as the one that lies before Lucent since Lucent already has the “in” with its hardware lead and has been named as the preferred hardware vendor in some of the biggest IMS projects being commenced, but Telcordia goes well beyond the network management focus of Lucent’s OSS portfolio and should do just fine.

Last week, Telcordia released the industry’s first IMS application for fixed/mobile convergence called Seamless Mobility. The application runs on Telcordia’s Converged Application Server and allows dual-mode handsets to terminate calls on fixed mobile, Wi-Fi or other VoIP networks. The company is hawking a full IMS portfolio called Maestro.

Deepak Kanwar, vice president of product management and marketing at Lucent, said, like the others, that, “The successful delivery of IMS is really contingent on making sure your OSS/BSS can support it.”

One of the more radical ideas for supporting what will at some point become a services-laden IMS infrastructure is to create a Service Operations Center (SOC) rather than or in addition to a NOC. “You don’t need to know a network element inside and out. What you need to know are the parameters for, say, a video-on-demand service and how to manage service level agreements,” Kanwar said.

Lucent is looking to leverage its hardware presence into a dominant position in OSS, particularly with network management related solutions. As mentioned above, Lucent plans to “put a SOC on it.” Its mission is to take carriers from smokestack network management to integrated service-oriented operations.

Managing services is a whole new dimension, Kanwar said. He said the present mode of operations, namely, separate management systems for voice, data and video networks, just won’t cut it.

“Some carriers have 60 performance management tools in their environment across different technologies. How can you really get a single service-centric view that way,” Kanwar said.

Lucent’s VitalSuite products provide Lucent with what seems like a natural fit for the network and access layers of IMS, especially as carriers do the previously unthinkable and proceed with a single-vendor approach. However, Lucent is emphatic about its multi-vendor capabilities and has grown its software portfolio to include application layer solutions as well as AAA services for security, ENUM and IP address management and QoS management. They also support rating and charging, one of the first big battlegrounds for OSS in IMS.

“In the initial stages of IMS, billing won’t be important until you get past the “me too” services, but the rating and charging of complex services will be important,” Kanwar said.

Also important will be the need to measure application performance. It may be impossible to monitor 1 million movie downloads on a Friday night, but service providers will need the ability to be proactive, to drill down to individual end-user networks when necessary and to monitor the service quality of their content partners.

This will all be new to service providers, and they may need as much guidance as they do software. The big OSS players like Lucent and Telcordia are counting on their professional services experts to step in and provide it.

And you know the time for OSS in IMS is getting close when other big players, such as IBM did last week, get off the wall and start to dance.