Views on IMS Global Congress 2010

We were invited to moderate a panel and showcase demos during the IMS Global Congress 2010 in Brussels organized by IIR. Firstly to say that it is a very good opportunity to evangelize, and we are glad to see that innovative companies are invited to discuss with leading vendors about trends and the future, and both together to try to evangelize carriers about their battle is not lost if they rely in their infrastructure to deliver new user experiences to their customer base.
During the congress it was discussed along a list of topics (LTE, Voice services using IMS, convergence, RCS). Our panel was about how difficult is for the ecosystem to work with carriers, and the need of API's soon better than full standarized, developers are costumed to adapt to changing APIs (as the social networks ones), but API's themselves :-) Better if finally there will be final API's fully standarized, but it is more important to have API's asap. A lot of services were developed with SMS using gateways with different API's. We proposed the same approach for RCS, to adopt as preferred the UNI (user to network interface) approach but leave the vendors to create their platforms (our own is the RCS Solution Gateway) offering API's and start working with them until final API's spec will arrive :-). Recent examples as the joint demo during RCS Asia Forum had proven this is the right path.
It was nice to see other spanish companies as technological MVNO Fonyou and Almira Labs transmit the message about how not only the value added is the hands of OTTs, the carrier still have space for innovation and customer delight.
Finally, mention to the positive feedback about the RCS joing trial in Spain (Movistar-Orange Spain) provided by the Orange representative explaining the results of customer survey. Users are willing to pay a some euros on top of fix data plans to have RCS as capability, and users like Instant Messaging provided by RCS.

Glat to hear that! Texting Rocks ! :-)