IF YOU'RE AN APPLICATIONS DEVELOPER LIKE COMVERSE, the IP multimedia subsystem architecture may look like a mixed blessing. On one hand, a whole new world of capabilities is unlocked in the network — the perfect playground for the advanced mobile services and features that Comverse is selling. But while IMS lends itself to mind-bogglingly powerful and subtle services, it also foretells the death of the application as we know it: bottom-up applications like mobile messaging service, push-to-talk and even voice mail lose their definition when replaced by a menu of features carriers can mix and match as they choose. If carriers can suddenly build their own unique applications, there's little use for an application vendor like Comverse, right?

Wrong, said James Colby, Comverse chief marketing officer for the Americas. Comverse readily admits that IMS will herald the end of the purpose-built application-in-a-box that has been Comverse's bread and butter since it sold its first voice mail platform more than a decade ago. In fact, Comverse embraces the notion, Colby said. As the individual components of the network become standardized and commoditized, the truly valuable service will be the ability to manipulate those components to create new and innovative applications. It's what Comverse has been doing all along with its own building blocks, Colby said, but in an IMS world, it will be building those apps from a communal set of blocks.

Comverse and its competitors are starting to revamp themselves as application architects — service designers that can customize and tailor an application to a particular carrier's needs. Fully realized IMS networks may still be years off, but carriers are already starting to embrace the concept of this kind of customized application, Colby said. As an example, he cited Mobile ESPN, the boutique mobile virtual network operator for sports fanatics. Comverse supplied applications servers for the virtual operator, but more significantly, it provided some of the key systems integration that tied the platforms of multiple other vendors together, Colby said. UIEvolution built the user interface, Convergys provided billing and Visage Mobile chipped in its service delivery platform while much of the core content was powered by ESPN's own proprietary technology, and to top it off, it's all running over Sprint's EV-DO network.

“There are a whole lot of elements to that solution — some of which we provided and others that we didn't — and we helped them pull them all together,” Colby said. “We want to provide the brains of the solution, the glue that ties all of those components together.”

COMVERSE ISN'T the only vendor eyeing the big picture. LogicaCMG, Openwave and the larger infrastructure vendors have all embraced the role of systems integrator, and many of them have already begun forming consortiums with other vendors to ensure they can keep their promises of a fully integrated network. In messaging powerhouse LogicaCMG's case, its traditional short messaging service center (SMSC) and MMSC have been replaced with what it calls a messaging applications server and its traditional siloed application approach replaced with a platform called intuitive messaging, an all-IP framework with links into multiple other vendors' own IP solutions.

“Making an SMSC or MMSC is peanuts,” said Chris Lennartz, LogicaCMG's global marketing director for mobile Internet. “Because of standards, there's little way to differentiate your product. …. SMS as a bearer is already commoditized. MMS before we even started became commoditized. You have to think beyond those applications and have an integrated holistic approach.”

While that holistic approach may be just what Comverse and LogicaCMG need to remain strong application vendors in an IMS world, they may find themselves with other obstacles to cross as not only carriers but content providers dial into the IMS model. Selling a network solution assumes the solution will reside on the network, and at least one vendor believes that IMS will have the side effect of drawing many traditional wireless applications off of the wireless network.

Neil Ostroff, product manager for signaling vendor Tekelec, said many wireline content and service providers like Yahoo and Google may chose to take advantage of IMS's convergence capabilities to develop and deploy their own applications in-house, instead of relying on the carriers to pull those services together. While that may sound like the “dumb pipe” business model all carriers are trying to avoid, IMS will give the carriers the capability to authenticate, regulate and bill for all traffic on the network, allowing them to retain a valuable spot in the value chain, Ostroff said.

“Carriers deploying their own infrastructure to run services is one leg of IMS,” Ostroff said. “That model will continue, but I'm not too optimistic. I think there will be a shift from the services being on the network to the more powerful services on the handset. Companies like Google can bypass the carrier infrastructure itself.”

Google, for instance, could use the session initiation protocol stack on a phone to communicate back to Google's own application servers information on presence, location and availability, running its own chat and messaging service with the carrier network acting as a conduit for the data. This kind of model would seem troubling for traditional applications vendors since they'd be cut from the loop, and although a new spate of service and content providers might suddenly become potential customers, many of those providers are fairly adept at developing their own applications.

Comverse's Colby, however, isn't ready to sell the farm just yet. There's a big difference between the promise of IMS and its actual implementation, he said. IMS is often described as a Utopian framework where any Joe with an MBA and a bright idea can swoop in and begin magically constructing a killer app, but in reality, Colby said, IMS is a collection of incredibly complex components built by a multitude of vendors. Those parts are intended to fit together seamlessly like a jigsaw puzzle, but it would be naïve to think any service provider can merely plug those components together and flip a switch. It will take both manhandling and finesse to get those parts to work as a sum, and the companies that have been building complex applications from proprietary components will be the same ones with the expertise to build those applications with standardized parts, Colby said.

“With every new technology we always think the barriers to entry are so much lower than they actually are,” Colby said. Even basic applications that today we take for granted, like voice mail and even just plain voice, were filled with complications and took years to perfect, he added. “IMS or no IMS, you still need a fairly large and fairly technical company to pull all of this together.”