Joy King, HP's worldwide marketing director for the network and service provider (NSP) business and ITU Telecom board member, tells group editor Joseph Waring why IMS is about lowering costs and how HP stands to benefit as the IT and telecom worlds converge
Telecom Asia: How important is IMS now and where do you see it first having an impact‾
Joy King: First of all, IMS is an architectural standard that is not fully developed. So it's pretty hard to implement given that it isn't fully formed. By definition any standard is an evolution, and this is a young standard so it's even earlier in the evolutionary process. It's not a network technology; it's a way of assembling a network based on standard, multi-purpose elements.
I do think it has a lot of promise - without a doubt it has promise for reducing the cost of network infrastructure. There's a lot of hype around the new services that can be enabled around IMS. I'm little inclined to believe that a lot of those services can be delivered today using Web services and service- oriented architecture without the need for IMS. But one of the advantages that IMS will bring to carriers is a lower cost of network infrastructure, which is very important.
If you look at some of the enormous and high-profile projects, like BT's 21st Century Network, Matt Bross [BT's CTO] is not spending billings of dollars to rip out the entire legacy infrastructure and implement an IP-based infrastructure because he has money to burn. He simple could not in their financial projections see a very long future for BT being able to afford to manage the infrastructure costs. He said you have to be bold and realize your costs are going to spike for a period of time while you make the conversion, but it will enable you to both deliver new service revenues and also drive your costs down. That is the great promise of IMS. As the standard evolves and as carriers convert to standard, IP-based networks costs will go down. But I do think that every operator is in a different place, and it's not an overnight solution - it can't be because it's not even fully defined.
What are you doing to educate the market‾
We're doing an enormous amount of briefings with operations. Interestingly, the IMS standard was really designed for the mobile world, but the operators that seem to be having greater uptake are the fixed-line carriers because the cost of the fixed-line world is so much higher and the margins are so much lower.
We are trying to be practical in advising carriers on what they can really do now and what they need to plan to do over time. Because HP is more on the engineering side, we like to do road-mapping exercises with our customers. One of the things we're doing with a lot of the big operators around the world is an actual workshop methodology to help them roadmap their network evolution and their operations and business support infrastructure evolution. This is probably the best way to combat the hype one operator at a time, rather than trying to take on the market from a marketing point of view.
How has the move away from offering specific products to delivering solutions changed the business‾
One of the questions we have internally is what is a 'solution'. Of course it's whatever solves your problem, so in some ways customers are offended by this.