By Thomas Howe, The Thomas Howe Company

Can you think of two more different application platforms than IMS and Web as platform? I bet that, in fifty years, it will be difficult to imagine that both architectures were developed during the same period in time, and that both had such massive amounts of attention and investment.  Whereas it is quite clear that the Internet is here to stay, and that software as service will dominate application architectures for as far out as we can see, the role of IMS in this larger environment is less clear. 

Today, very few leading technologists deny the eventual dominance of web services based applications.  All major internet companies, Fortune 500 enterprises and network infrastructure providers provide web services interfaces, use them internally or design equipment and provide professional services to enable their deployment. For good reason, as applications which provide or are based on web services have fundamental advantages over closed network designs, from the economics of development and operation, the global reach of service delivery and the opportunities they provide for business partnerships and channels. 

Just as there was a time in the early twentieth century when factory owners discarded in-house power generation in favor of electrical service from a far-off utility; enterprises in the twenty-first century will discard multi-million dollar enterprise software installations for pay-as-you go services delivered over broadband. In my field of voice mashups, a light weight approach to designing voice applications using web services, purchasing a special purpose switch or installing massive infrastructure seems a bit silly, if not downright stupid. Voice mashups need web services to make their deployment practical.

You could argue that the current spate of Web 2.0 sites is simply our first, halting attempts at providing web-services based applications, and from this, one thing is abundantly clear: four people teams sitting in a garage somewhere regularly crank out applications that capture the imagination and the wallet, when Microsoft and its cast of thousands and bank accounts with billions hasn't deployed an innovative application in five years.  The real world evidence is damning.

At the gut level, it seems like IMS architectures are completely opposite in their implementation, approach and philosophy.  Instead of emphasizing and supporting connection to services outside the network walls, IMS has multiple elements designed to control, monitor and restrict them.  Instead of recognition that the true "customer" of a network is the application, IMS emphasizes the dominance of the network operator.  Instead of enabling pay-as-you go offerings by reducing capital costs for both the customer and the service provider, IMS demands massive investment from the carrier.  This is particularly tough on the business case because it's very difficult to answer with certainty what new revenue is enabled by deployment of an IMS architecture, and would therefore justify the investment. In a world dominated by the Prius carrying Al Gore, IMS looks increasingly like a 1976 V8 Chrysler Cordoba driven by Dick Cheney.

Given this very different approach and world view, what, if any, opportunities exist for IMS architectures to add enduring value in tomorrow's networks?  Rock and Roll and classical music co-exist, can Web as platform and IMS?

Although certainly not the last word on the subject, there is at least one natural overlap between IMS architectures and the programmable web: scale.  Much of the efficiency gained by SAAS – software-as-a-service - deployments comes from centralization.  When software is delivered as a utility, it first of all saves operational costs to the subscriber.  Instead of paying money for local staff to install, maintain and manage the software, this job is outsourced to the provider.  This is a natural efficiency, because instead of a thousand site installations, there's only one. 

Secondly, SAAS enables the delivery of software as a pay-as-you go service, giving more opportunities for efficient and sophisticated pricing models.  As the number of subscribers grows, these efficiencies increase and benefit all in the value chain. Applications in the future depend upon two fundamentals:  large scale information utilities that provide building blocks for them, and lightweight models for their integration.

IMS may be the perfect starting architecture for creating utilities that provide a large scale telephony service to the general public as a web service. Unfortunately, a pure IMS architecture fails to provide a decent web services interface, but this extension would not be too hard to create.   Successful IMS deployments in web services environments will center around building blocks, and except for the most trivial examples, will focus on providing a service to be integrated with other applications.  Good examples of this sort of service include click-to-dial, outbound messaging, on-demand conferencing, skills based routing and predictive dial call centers.  These services are quite generic, and can be easily provided from a distance.  

This isn't great news for carriers, as becoming a large scale utility providing basic services to higher level applications hurries them along the road to becoming dumb pipe vendors. However, it plays to their strengths and provides them a credible long term position in tomorrow's market.  IMS may not be the ruler of next generation services, but as a component, IMS may still have its place.

For more, visit Thomas Howe's Website.