IMS Week-in-Review for July 24-28, 2006

By Mae Kowalke

TMCnet Associate Editor

 

IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) news picked up somewhat this week, with announcements from Manx Telecom, Lucent, CommuniGate, Pactolus, Skype (News - Alert), RadiSys, Convedia, Soleo, and Telcordia. Enjoy the feast!

 

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The week started off with Manx Telecom’s selection of Lucent’s solutions to deploy new “blended” VoIP, data and video services using a converged network.

 

In part, the deal calls for Lucent to supply Manx with some of the IMS elements it needs to support advanced multimedia services.

 

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CommuniGate Systems announced Tuesday the roll-out of its “Trade In and Trade Up” program, designed to ease carrier upgrades for next-generation services like VoIP and hosted PBXs.

 

The initiative enables service providers to smoothly migrate their communications services to an IMS-ready platform.

 

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The news continued Wednesday with Pactolus’ launch of its new educational services geared toward developers using the company’s RapidFLEX platform to create innovative services.

 

Pactolus explained that developers now have access to a curriculum that accelerates their ability to build distinctive SIP and IMS-based applications.

 

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In a July, 2006 Internet Telephony Magazine article published to TMCnet.com Wednesday, NMS Communications marketing director Mike Katz looks at both current and future impacts of Skype’s free phone services on the telecom industry, and asks—among other things—what role IMS will play in all this.

 

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Also Wednesday, AdvancedTCA (News - Alert) specialist RadiSys announced its plans to acquire Convedia Corporation, a global leader in IMS. Convedia’s expertise will enable RadiSys to offer service providers the tools to roll out value-added multimedia services to both residential and business customers.

 

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Finally, on Thursday Soleo Communications announced its new status as a charter member of Telcordia’s Technologies VoIP Directory and Operator Services Signaling Forum.

 

The forum is Telcordia’s response to requests from supplies and service providers to intercede on their behalf to influence decisions made by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

 

This is a very timely development, given the current industry focus on IMS-based architectures and the standards used to define them. Telcordia’s specific goal is to address Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) parameters for different types of services.

 

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That’s it, another week’s worth of IMS-related news digested into a few paragraphs. Join us next time for another sampling…