This announcement was made on May 8 during the opening keynote at the JavaOne event in San Francisco. The collaboration brings the worlds of telecom and IT closer together, and dramatically boosts the scope and scale of IMS applications development. Combined, these effects will push the growth of the IMS ecosystem.

Todd Ashton, head of IMS sales at Ericsson, says: "This is a significant development. We are now making it clear that we want third-party and independent application developers on board to take IMS to the next level. If I may use an analogy - we have the plumbing in place, now we need to get the water running. In the case of IMS, this is the IMS components and a whole new range of applications developed by third-party and independent open-source developers."

In order to support the convergence between the IT and telecommunications industries, Ericsson has in parallel with Sun already joined forces with BEA and Intel to offer third-party developers access to converged services delivery platforms through their respective developer programs.

Martin Harriman, from Ericsson's Business Unit Multimedia, says the move to open source will support the operators. "Operators also want to take advantage of open-source communities to develop local applications to their own specifications. Operators will now be able to develop applications at their own pace."

In this collaboration, Ericsson will contribute parts of its server development to the GlassFish open-source project. The supporting program includes a variety of tools and expertise to support developer communities, as well as provide the opportunity for developers to test their applications on a live IMS-based network.