The Show Daily catches up with Lucent Technologies CTO Tom Goodwin and VP of Asia Pacific/China applications sales Peter O'Donnell who outline the company's latest push - IMS and blended services
Show Daily: What is Lucent focusing on at this show‾ Are there any areas of focus that we should be expecting to see at your booth‾
O'Donnell: We started with an interesting paradox: Asia has some of the most innovative, services-rich operators in the world, and yet revenues and profits are harder than ever to achieve. Why‾ We think it has a lot to do with the need for next generation networks (NGN) to mean a lot more than just cost savings and for services to be delivered as a lot more than just a bundle.
Goodwin: In NGN we decided that Asian operators need to see the acclaimed 'flat IP' disruptive technology of the Lucent Base Station Router, which was awarded a prize at CTIA, as it represents the combination of cost saving and new service capability service providers want.
O'Donnell: And while in some parts of Asia consumers have a choice of many hundreds of services, with ring-tones, music downloads and gaming predominating, the bundling paradigm has run its course - now consumers are ready for true blending of services, for a whole new experience. Blending is different than bundling. Bundling is providing economical access to a wide menu of separate services. By contrast blending is all about enabling traditionally independent services to interact with one another, typically by sharing information such as buddy lists, location data, presence information and subscriber preferences and profiles. Services such as instant messaging can be combined with IP voice and video capabilities to create such new offerings as multi-party video conferencing, switched into and out of, without stopping and starting new sessions. But this relies on a new approach, grounded in IMS.
So what exactly is IMS‾
Goodwin: IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) is a group of standards defined by the 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards bodies. In addition to these mobility based standards bodies, other groups such as TISPAN are adopting key elements of the IMS standards. Because the IMS standards have been built around existing protocols with a view toward the future, we see IMS as the open standard architecture for the future to create new revenue generating services.
O'Donnell: But standards have to be incorporated into products in order to deliver valuable services. A note of caution: there is a very big difference being 'IMS ready' and 'IMS compliant'. In the latter case, the spirit of open standards is preserved, allowing service providers to rely on it. In the former, the fear is that inter-working will be compromised, affecting service flexibility and quality.
What are the advantages of moving to an open standard platform‾
Goodwin: An operator has some real distinctive advantages in using open standard platforms. Some of the key reasons for going to a standard platform such as IMS are: reduced costs and faster time to market with one deployment of core assets; the shared assets leads to streamlined operations for lower operating costs; and of course, increased revenues from blended services.