The search for the "killer app" and the promised land of SIP: the only 3 reasons for IMS


Many people in the inustry frequently ask " what is the killer app". They have obvisouly not understood the indutry very well, or have made a quantum leap from 1999 to 2006. There is no such thing anymore as the Killer App. That died with the stockmarket of 2001....

So what should we look for then on top of IMS, someone asked. Well, the main benefit of IMS, as many people would forget, is the cost savings it has for the carriers. Of course after you paid for the new infrastructure, that is. The simple reason, old telecom equipment is expensive, people are expensive, software and hardware is expensive, and you need different infra for mobile and for fixed operations. IMS should tackle these problems and lower CAPEX and OPEX. The cost saving factor is often forgotten. One of the more advanced operators have recognised this, and are actually reporting on their expected ROI and the status of their IP network implementation progress.

Another most important reason why to go for IMS, is in the underlying technology: SIP. Looking at the roots of SIP, it is meant as a session protocol. You start a session, you do whatever in that. This is a great facilitator, especially for Mobile operators, to increase traffic. From our user studies it is clearly stated that users dislike current silos of applications on their mobile phones. When you are in a call, you cannot easily send an SMS, or when you are writing a message, you need to decide whether it is going to be SMS or MMS (WHY on earth did anyone think it is a good idea to ask the user to choose a technology first, and then start writing a message. I'd like to meet that person, and tell him he killed the MMS business). So the bottom line, the easier you make it for end users, the more they will make communicate, the more operators will profit. This of course does mean you better make darn sure the services are easy to use (and as we have seen in my previous blogs, this hasn't had the highest attention even though it should have)

The third most important reason for IMS is of course the fact that both mobile and fixed speak the same language. Again, the more end points you can have, the more traffic you will have, the more operators will profit. SMS was a small business until operators started to interconnect. Think about what will happen if users will start to communicate more, from more devices wherever they are, to more people that are on fixed, mobile, or other connected devices. An extra bonus is that you can now have your brand on all consumer's devices and "own" their desktops.

Then there are a lot of other reasons for IMS that I've heard but the bottom line is: they are not important. Being able to quickly launch new services is one of them. It has never been the technological difficulties to quickly launch new services. It has been the size of the organisation, the bureaucracy, the unwillingness to change the hugely profitable voice minutes and SMS.

Bottom line for IMS: cost savings, increase in traffic as (if done well) as communication is easier, increase in traffic as there are more end points to communicate with (if deployed properly across all devices). It's that simple!