IMS promises the delivery of exciting and innovative services, faster and more easily than ever before. Enthusiastic supporters of IMS like to believe that it will bring about the death of OSS as we know it. They point out that IMS is all about standardization, and with it, the mechanisms to move toward the long promised vision of the plug-and-play service offering. In other words, standards will simplify all the things which OSS used to do.
However, the more pragmatic supporters of IMS will note that it is all about engagement of the customer with sophisticated product bundles and charging models that can be rapidly repackaged to pre-empt changes in market requirements and competitive pressures. This can potentially be a powerful tool in the search of the elusive killer app. Such a focus on innovation and differentiation, however, places new pressures on the OSS.
If you follow the standard approach, then it is possible to achieve many of the benefits inherent in IMS. With simplified provisioning through standardized profiling, using home subscriber servers and subscription management, as well as alignment with defined online and offline charging practices, IMS has the potential to really simplify the OSS processes.
Simplify, not eliminate
However, this view of IMS is challenged from a number of directions, not least of all from IMS equipment and application vendors seeking to differentiate outside the framework of standards, and service providers moving ahead of the standards as they seek to meet customer demands for new services. Larger telecoms operators are creating their own extensions to the standards and enforcing these through their own buying power, ensuring sophisticated services requiring provisioning and charging interfaces outside of the IMS core and into the multi-vendor and multi-technology network.
There is also the challenge of new business models , such as the incorporation of third-party applications leading to a heavily multi-vendor and non-standardized environment. Quality of Service (QoS) in IMS requires an increased level of network and infrastructure knowledge to provision services, and as a result provides a new dimension for charging and rating.
The standard view of IMS is caught up in the short-term issues of deploying IMS cost effectively and using existing infrastructure to do so. Making a long-term success of IMS is all about customer engagement - using agility and responsiveness to acquire and then defend market share. Sooner or later, operators will have to start thinking of the IMS standard as a framework which can be built on to achieve innovation.
The role of the OSS must be considered in light of this long-term view:
Network and infrastructure planning. These traditional activities will be more important than ever as IMS increases capacity requirements and introduces QoS into services that must be provisioned, maintained and charged.
Provisioning. While subscriber provisioning will take place in the IMS core, sophisticated services will still require provisioning outside of the IMS standards domain. The existing challenges of vendor and technology independence will be coupled with the challenges of responsiveness and agility.
Assurance - designing the service, session and transport layers to support the required QoS.
The traditional engineering challenges of minimizing mean time between failures and to repair will be more applicable in IMS, where operators can differentiate on promised QoS and charge on the basis of the actual delivered QoS to the end-user.