Carrier's desperation driving IMS ??? Not the best approach ...

Heavy Reading has just published a report on IMS status in carriers. "IMS Deployment Update: Promise & Challenges" (executive summary here). It shows that two perceptions I have already heard elsewhere are really quite widespread:

First (quoting from TMCnet), one of the conclusions from the report's author: "After several years of unvarnished hype, IMS has moved from hero to zero faster than the average telco panacea [...] IMS is a dying issue."

But, strinkingly, operator representatives also admit to be "struggling to find a position in the Web 2.0 world," and that "we don't see any other way to go but IMS."

On one hand we see that there is some perception that IMS is not only going down the hype curve, but actually dying. This is somehow expected. It will take some time to overcome all the issues of an over-hyped, very complex and new technology. And it remains to be seen how different will be what it is now IMS (in specs and drawing boards) from the result of that distillation process.

On the other hand, the carriers are desperate to embrace IMS' promise. But are they adding the non-technical components that are needed to make it a success? I am talking about imagination here. Migrating existing services to IMS will not provide much benefit, market needs imaginative services, but there is no much creativity yet. New services (like PoC) are not launched because of concerns about cannibalisation or revenue erosion ... Why not create new business models (such as PoC person-to-machine / machine-to-person, etc)? Risk is negligible for carriers, and much better than desperation anyway.

Following a long tradition, operators are turning to vendors to provide some "mojo", but incumbents suppliers are also worried about erosion of established businesses. Startups are more likely to provide the innovation the market needs.