A recent report, IMS Market Opportunities: From Standardization To Implementation, identifies some key findings regarding the development potential of IMS. 

The report, written and compiled by Pyramid Research consultant Achmad Moeljadi Chadran and VP of Research Leslie Arathoon, says that IMS, as currently conceived, addresses the needs and concerns of tier-one and tier-two service providers, including both wireline and wireless operators.

“IMS addresses a very serious predicament faced by both wireline and wireless service providers worldwide: proliferating alternatives are driving both voice service revenue and subscriber growth downward, while a new class of web-based businesses – for which telecom services are vital to their value chain, but locked out of their revenue chain – have grown spectacularly,” it says.

The report also examines IMS’s role in managing new services across the value chain.

“The unique value of IMS lies not in the ability to develop and launch new, innovative services, but in its ability to manage those services across the value chain. By logically segregating control-plane traffic from service traffic, IMS allows the efficient reuse of common systems for customer registration, activation, session initiation, duration and termination, rating and billing, across multiple service platforms and access media,” 

Service innovation is seen as an important way of driving demand for IMS technology from service providers. The report suggests watching tier-one providers such as Telefonica, AT&T, and Sprint Nextel to utilize service innovation to retain customer loyalty. 

The authors write that service providers are looking to IMS not only as an enabler for innovative web-based offerings, but also as a way to tie their legacy infrastructures into such offerings. They predict that IMS standards will mature in 2010.

Smaller operators and greenfield service providers stand to gain from IMS because, as they mature, IMS standards will lead to integration of service platforms and back-office systems, with simpler interoperability. This will result in decreased opex and capex.