IMS World Forum summary.

We attended the IMS World Forum last week and also showcased in the WebRTC pre-conference Workshop our case of WebRTC, to create ubiquitious Unified Communications in the browser combining voice and joyn and using WebRTC for media.

Alan Quayle who chaired the workshop just published a post with all the slides and demos showcased there. Once againg we could see that small companies are ahead both in vision and execution of telcos and could be very helpful if telcos approached properly.

Some points to summarize the conference:

a) Finally IMS is taking off but too linked to particular services as VoLTE, telcos are not seeing yet IMS as core container of multiple services and just wants the first case to pay the full IMS. This is not easy.

b) In case of RCS, RCS in a box and/or hosted vendors (as Newpace) are finding a very good opportunity there. RCS is getting traction as more vendors not involved till now are offering now Instant Messaging Application Server.

c) We could identify among the speakers the ones finding reasons to do and the others looking for reasons to delay and delay and delay. Some speakers talk about WebRTC as opportunity to create endpoints for IMS but they talked about the need to wait until codec issue was solved and be sure about QoS control. As the chair of the session pointed, last chain of QoS can not be controlled, it is not a real advantage.
Also, we knew about IMS based services deployment plans, for example the presented by Sebastian Schumann by Slovak Telekom Mavenir speaker slides included MetroPCS roadmap including joyn API enabled cases, sharing our vision.

d) A lot of debate about business models. Telcos did not understand yet that Say's Law is real today in the IT space. Supply created demand. It happened with OTTs, it happened with independent telco APIs  as Tropo or Twilio. Telcos may take a bit of risk to create services that can attract the demand and see how to monetize. We talk recently about that in this post.