Written by: Ulf Olsson and Mats Stille

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IMS gives developers a tremendous range of opportunities to create services, and this freedom is being used to craft timely, attractive, innovative and differentiating applications as well as standardized services from, for example, 3GPP and OMA. This ensures that operators continue to play a valuable and profitable part in delivering voice, video, text, and more to a gigantic consumer community. Significantly, IMS brings multimedia-enabled communication to the market while retaining the basic characteristics of telecommunications: reliability, predictability and global reach.

The authors explore Ericsson's strategy for achieving differentiation and mass-market reach in the same architecture.

Introduction
Based on the following observations, it would seem inevitable that IMS will succeed. First, IP technology is essentially the basis for all present and future mass-market communication. Second, users are attracted by experiences that are rich in multimedia features, such as high-quality audio, video, and multimode communication. Third, the market anticipates the rapid creation and introduction of multiple services. Fourth, these new services must be able to fully utilize the capabilities of access network technology. And finally, only one comprehensive, multi-vendor, multi-operator, internationally standardized architecture fulfills all these criteria: IMS.

But as history repeatedly shows, the most perfect technology does not always prevail. Instead, the winning alternative is the one that is capable of attracting real market support. Therefore, there is a need to show that IMS has the qualities to become the clear tool of choice for application developers. This article explores how the advanced and varied features of IMS can simply and effectively be packaged and exposed to developers and user communities.

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