On the road to IMS: The journey starts here
transcript

Christine Bentsen: Hi, this is Christine Bentsen, your host for OpenCall podcast. Today I'm speaking with Steve Dietch from HP OpenCall and Lars Rossen from HP OpenView. Our topic today is "On the road to IMS." Let's start with you, Steve. Could you tell me a little bit about your role at HP?

Steve Dietch: Sure. Thanks, Christine. I'm the director of worldwide marketing for the HP OpenCall business, with responsibility for solution marketing, product marketing, services marketing, and demand generation and awareness activities.

Christine Bentsen: Super. And Lars, what do you do at HP?

Lars Rossen: Yes, I'm a member of the OpenView office of strategy and technology. Within that I look after the telecommunication market, in particular how we expand and apply our OpenView portfolio to address the management need of our service providers.

Christine Bentsen: Super, super. OK, so as I mentioned, our topic today is on the road to IMS. The term IMS is a huge buzzword today. Why is there such a focus? Steve, do you want to start us off on that one?

Steve Dietch: Sure. The IP multimedia subsystem, or IMS, the importance lies in the fact that it provides the vision and defines various means to helping service providers meet their medium term and long term objectives, which revolve around offering subscriber-centric services. Allowing subscribers to be able to access their communication and entertainment services at any time from any place from any device. Deliver services that are personal, context aware, and rich with content. And finally, be highly adaptive, cost efficient, and able to anticipate and meet the needs of their customers. IMS is essentially a new paradigm. It's the next generation service and network architecture for service providers. And although it was originally intended as a means to enable the mobile Internet, it's now found a much broader industry acceptance. Whether it's wireless carriers, wireline, broadband, or cable. And it really is there to deliver a very, very rich multimedia, high quality, access agnostic experience for users. And ultimately focus on helping service providers not only address the three objectives I mentioned before, but really drill down and help them focus on the big three financial levers. Raising their revenue, reducing the cost of acquiring customers, and finally reducing churn.

Christine Bentsen: OK, so how...I heard you tell me that IMS is the next generation platform and it enables all these new services. But how does it enable the three triggers?

Steve Dietch: Sure. As it relates to revenue, IMS provides the flexibility and the cost efficiency to allow service providers to offer new, innovative services in a cost effective way. So focusing on ARPU. Today service providers have multiple challenges, including the fact that their traditional sources of revenue, voice and text messaging, are either flattening or declining. IMS provides the flexibility, it provides the means to innovate, it provides a much stronger user experience combining multiple types of media, whether it be voice, video, and data, and ultimately help those service providers drive average per user up. Meaning ARPU.

Christine Bentsen: I see, I see. OK, so what are the main challenges that service providers face moving to IMS?

Steve Dietch: Well, I think there's multiple challenge there and it's, it goes beyond IMS. There are all sorts of market challenges that exist today that service providers have to deal with in order to achieve their objectives that I mentioned. The subscriber centricity, rich personal content, adaptable infrastructure, etc. First, you've got this huge convergence of telecom, Internet, and media going on and the competition is intense. It's just not the way it was. You've got traditional, traditional service providers not only fighting with themselves but you've got application service provider, ISPs, cable entities, media properties, and new entrants like Google, AOL, Microsoft, eBay, and Yahoo! that all want a piece of your wallet. Not only for your telecommunication needs, but for your entertainment needs. second, you've got regulation and deregulation that are all...you know, opening up all sorts of competitive dynamics that didn't exist in the past. You've got changing technology that is providing all sorts of opportunities for new services, but driving cost down. You've got user experience that is extremely challenging. In many cases it's just too complex today. The world of communication services has traditionally been viewed as a series of disconnected services with nonintegrated information, siloed, very, very disparate and very difficult to use. Dealing with that is a challenge. The infrastructure today is proprietary and monolithic and redundant. And finally spend. How much are people actually willing to spend given that we know that the percentage of wallet is pretty consistent as it relates to telecommunication services over time. You combine all that, you look at IMS, and you've got a very, very challenging environment. Now the good thing is that IMS actually is going to help service providers address many of those challenges by providing a means to, address the key points that I mentioned along those six dimensions as well as allow them to meet their objectives. IMS is essentially providing flexibility on a lot of different dimensions. Business models, technology, etc., etc., that are really going to go to the heart of the matter.

Christine Bentsen: And when you speak about the convergence of services, I look at my cell phone and I'm thinking, you know, my cell phone is not just to make phone calls on anymore. I text message and I got on the Internet with it last night. I take photos and send them to people. So everything that you were talking about is actually represented in the cell phones that most of us hold in our hand every day. And we're expecting more and more from them. So it's the consumers that are really driving this, isn't it?

Steve Dietch: I think it's a combination. Consumers clearly are driving much of the, the industry push for more innovative, more compelling, easier to use services that are all about me. So it's very, very important to understand that the telecommunications industry, the service provider industry, the communication, media and entertainment industries, are all moving from a model that was mass market to mass customization. Moving from a telecom model to a retail model where you have very, very targeted offerings. It's essentially all about me. Personalization. Am I getting the right set of services at the right time in the right devices that I want. So the consumers clearly are putting pressure on this ecosystem of media and entertainment and communication service providers to provide services that are more about me as opposed to more about us and this broader audience. But at the same time enterprises who essentially provide the bulk of spending as it relates to a large swatch of the communication services today are demanding their own set of more innovative communication services. Whether it be wireless or wireline or broadband. And for all intents and purposes, providing a very seamless environment to provide their workers with the most cost effective and most leveragable environment to be a more productive worker.

Christine Bentsen: Of course, sure. So is IMS the only option to get to this point? If not, are there other opportunities? Are there other platforms? Or is IMS the silver bullet that we're looking for?

Steve Dietch: So I wouldn't call it a silver bullet. I think a lot of people get caught up with IMS, that it's going to cure everything, all the issues that are evolved. What I think is more important is to understand the principles or the commercial relevance behind IMS. The differentiation here is that IMS is really focused on providing a flexible, horizontal network and services architecture that provides that access agnostic, multimedia experience. It really provides the means for service providers to retain control of their business and provide significant value to their customers as well as third party application service providers, content providers, the whole ecosystem. It really provides the flexibility and the means to, to create a much more robust environment for offering the right services to the right people at the right time. Is it IMS or is it the principles? I think the principles about it, around moving from a very proprietary, very monolithic, very expensive infrastructure to something that's more flexible, more cost effective, based on IT principles, is something that every service provider around the world is going to focus on. Whether they're looking to drive revenue up or cost down.

Christine Bentsen: Super, super. What is HP bringing to the picture?

Steve Dietch: The HP strategy is focused on helping service providers take advantage of all these industry paradigm shifts, addressing the challenges that we mentioned, ARPU increases, churn, acquisition costs, and really driving towards fulfilling key objectives. Which we mentioned before were subscriber-centric services that are personal, content rich, cost effective, cost effective not only to deploy but actually to manage as well. Now, we're doing this by taking our customers on a phased journey that allows them a smooth transition from today's inflexible, vertical siloed, legacy environment to tomorrow's next generation IMS-based services and network infrastructure. And ultimately, when we talk about IMS, and ultimately the promise that it brings, cost efficiency, flexibility, and service innovation. This journey is by no means a revolution. We believe it's an evolution and it recognizes the need to take a gradual approach to realizing service provider objectives. And this journey essentially revolves around three phases. Consolidation, convergence, and then ultimately service innovation. It's...We don't have the opportunity to go into a lot of detail here, but what I can tell you is that the means for us to take our customers on this journey is based on the HP service delivery platform as well as on our integrated services management blueprints. These blueprints provide essentially a roadmap. They lay out the steps that we believe our customers need to take to reach the ultimate end stage and take advantage of what IMS is all about. And ultimately address the challenges and meet their objectives. What I can do right now is pass the microphone over the Lars Rossen who can talk a little bit more about the integrated services management and actually other aspects of our OpenView portfolio.

Christine Bentsen: Super.

Lars Rossen: Thank you, Steve. Yes, integrated service management is quite an important part of our offering from HP. What we see now with the introduction of IMS and service delivery platforms and the entire convergence of being much more focused on, on, an NGOSS way of introducing new services and managing personalized services. The management of that becomes increasingly complex. So even though IMS is a great platform for standardizing some of that work, the end result, at least in a transition period and probably in many years to come, is the reality where the relationship between the end-user experience and the individual component that delivers that experience, will become increasingly complex. It already is very complex. And so what we're very focused on, with our integrated service management approach, is to make sure that we construct solutions to be able to manage, provide, and monitor these end-user experience end-to-end. And that implies that it's not enough just to have a management system that sort of sits on top an IMS infrastructure and as soon as...as long as the IMS system runs then everything is nice and OK. We still have the traditional transmission networks, data networks, etc., that needs to be well managed. There is the end-user devices that needs to be managed. And that's coming back to your comments earlier on how these mobile phones, which increasingly is not really a phone any longer. It's a camera, it's a multimedia device of some sort. And goes the same with set-top boxes and your PCs, etc. And there is an increasing need for being able to manage these end devices. So that is one aspect that we are focusing on with our integrated service management approach in HP. The other end of it is that if we look at the IMS infrastructure, it really is a number of applications running on data centers. And because...and that also goes with the service delivery platforms on top and all the applications that is delivering these nice multimedia experiences or modern voice calls, etc. It's really application running on data centers. So suddenly for a telecommunication company, they increasingly is being transformed into being a managed service organization. They need to manage very traditional IT environments. And this is an area where HP, especially with our OpenView portfolio, has a great opportunity to provide value to the service providers. Because we have a long history of being able to manage exactly these kinds of environments.

Christine Bentsen: You mentioned service delivery platform. Could you explain a little bit more about the concept of a service delivery platform and how it relates to IMS?

Lars Rossen: I can give a first stab at it, but I think that I'll pass it over to Steve or to give more details on it. But in essence it's a, it's a platform whereby all of these applications that we want to deliver to the, to the users can be developed, maintained, and introduced, and removed again. That can be applications such as sharing of photos or find your nearest friends based on location, etc., etc. But Steve, you probably can give much more examples and description on what an SDP is really about.

Steve Dietch: Yeah, let me take a stab at it. You know, the HP service delivery platform is essentially, as I mentioned before, the strategic blueprint for helping service providers successfully complete that three phase journey. Consolidation, convergence, and innovation. The SDP provides the means to develop, provision, and deploy standard-based user services and migrate them today from the legacy networks to the next generation IMS networks. You know, the SDP does this by focusing on key areas that service providers need to address in making that transition to IMS. Service creation and composition. Service delivery infrastructure. Service management. Transport. Signaling. And end-user devices. The SDP allows service providers to deliver services whether they be Web-based, non-trusted, third party, or actually within the walled garden real-time services that can access multiple network types. Fixed, mobile, broadband. And of multiple generations, whether it be 2G, 2.5G, 3G, IMS. Essentially bridging the networks of today and tomorrow by evolving the existing network model from that monolithic, very inflexible to a services-oriented architecture.

Christine Bentsen: Thank you, Steve. Back to Lars, what are the key considerations, challenges, and opportunities for network management in an IMS environment?

Lars Rossen: Well, there is a couple of aspects and I've briefly touched on it before. That one of the challenges that it's a completely new kind of environment that you're building. So all the traditional methodologies for managing a service which is around managing the network it's transported on becomes, it's not irrelevant, but it's not the important aspect any longer. So, so, what needs to be considered when implementing an IMS environment is make sure that all the, the kind of interfaces and functionality around making sure that you can instrument and understand whether the IMS environment is actually running and working, that this is in place. And there is not a long tradition for doing this because it is a new field that is popping up. There is a lot to be learned from how you traditionally would do that in service delivery in a traditional IT environment. So that would be about talking about performance management of an application infrastructure. It would be talking about how can you introspect applications or what is going on inside the IMS environment to be able to understand that it's actually functioning and not being degraded. The other challenge that exist is there is not a direct mapping between the actual service that is delivered and individual components of the IMS infrastructure. So it becomes increasingly complex and difficult to debug if there are issues with the service delivery. So what we are looking into a lot within the integrated service management blueprint and set of methodologies that we are proposing to the industry is how can we do the mapping between these individual IMS components and the actual services that is running on top of it.

Christine Bentsen: Why are the challenges different?

Lars Rossen: The challenge is different because you are introducing another set of abstraction layers. So, all the services that you're selling really just becomes programs that runs on server farms, you could say. So you don't any longer have some physical equipment that deliver the service, but it's very much a logical infrastructure. It's also what gives all the flexibility. So when you introduce new services or find out a service is not relevant any longer, you can remove it again without actually having to deploy new equipment. Which is a good thing. But the bad thing is that suddenly it's much more complicated to figure out the quality of whatever you are delivering.

Christine Bentsen: I see. Are there any unique demands on uptime requirements?

Lars Rossen: They are, they are sort of unchanged. As always it always needs to work. And that is actually also a requirement we see coming in from this convergence of the media and entertainment industry. It's always been joked about that it's extremely important that if you have or sell service to banks, etc., that they need always to be up. But there's nothing that is more important than a football match delivery in Saturday or Sunday afternoons.

Christine Bentsen: Of course, of course. OK, so how does a service provider tie it all together, from defining a service, evaluating a service, the whole service delivery aspect. Creation to retirement. How does a service provider go about doing that in the IMS environment.

Lars Rossen: That's a very good question and I think most operators are really struggling with this. Because one of the big drivers for IMS is really the agility aspect. The possibility to very quickly introduce services or modify services. And also take it out of service again if it turns out not to be relevant. But in order to do that you need to use a completely different methodology for, for doing it. You could say in the old days it took something like 14 years for Europe to introduce ISDN services. And now we are maybe down to we could introduce services in a year or two. But what you need to do in the new world is be able to introduce services in a matter of weeks. So what we are doing is, that is coming in with some of the acquisitions we've done recently, is actually lifecycle tools. So having tools to be able to manage the lifecycle of services. Which is not unlike the tools that you would also use in a traditional IT environment for introducing new services to...within an IT environment. So it's, it's all a matter of being able to define all the various process, that follow them through and being able to automate the process of ensuring that everything is rightly tested, introduced, and is not conflicting with what else runs in the complex environment. So it's very much an area that we have focused on in HP as we want to address being able to help service providers and accomplish.

Christine Bentsen: So when a service provider is looking at moving to IMS, they're evaluating different vendors, Why should HP be their choice?

Steve Dietch: Very good question. So, you know, HP is not only helping service providers address the standards. We're really leveraging the vision of IMS and applying our thought leadership to take it one step further. And provide differentiated solutions that solve the most pressing challenges facing our customers today. Whether that's effectively deploying multimedia services, managing subscriber data, implementing flexible charging solutions, deploying scalable signaling infrastructures, managing end-to-end service, the service experience as Lars just mentioned. We have a very, very broad and deep portfolio of product solutions, services, and support. A global footprint. Over 30 years in the telecommunications industry. We've really taken to heart to bring the flexibility of IT to the telecommunications world in the past. So the way the industry is evolving, particularly with the basic IMS principles, we feel very confident that we are in a very unique position to bridge the gap between IT and telecom. You couple that with our strength on the media and entertainment side, or the content side, and we then have HP who can deliver against the needs of both the content media and actually the distribution side of the equations. We feel very, very strongly that we are in a, as I mentioned before, unique position to help service providers and their content partners address the challenges that they're facing today and tomorrow.

Christine Bentsen: Super. So when you say today and tomorrow, that was going to be my next question. So you're helping customers anticipate the future. When you look forward, what do you think is next? What is the next big thing they need to be preparing for?

Steve Dietch: Well, I think it just goes back to the basic challenges they're facing today. They have, you know, subscribers are demanding more. They're demanding a much more personal experience that's all about me. They want that to be delivered in a price competitive way. And they're quite demanding that the user experience be a whole lot better than it is today. Particularly a lot simpler. Those challenges then have to be translated into actions from the service provider side. That means, hey, I need to deal with a very inflexible infrastructure. It's very costly to run. I need to be able to move extremely fast and get to market a lot quicker than I am today. And do it a lot cheaper. I need to be able to experiment at a very, very low cost. In many cases most services that are launched fail. In the past, even up to today, that doesn't bode well for investments. Because those investments are not reusable. Going forward you want an infrastructure and you want a set of processes and a mindset where you have a very, very flexible approach to experimentation. And that needs to be based on an infrastructure where you can test, fail, and repeat very, very quickly. Those challenges are not going to, to, to diminish, nor disappear, in the foreseeable future. Remember, that, you know, in the past telecommunications industry, as Lars mentioned before in his ISDN example, is not very, is not very quick. It takes a long time to get things through the system. That, that will be, in many cases, the way things evolve in the future. It will be faster than it has in the past, but in order to deal with these challenges it is a long term journey that service providers and their partners are going to have to go through. So I see IMS. I see next generation networks. I see the services challenges. Those are going to exist for many, many years to come.