'Telcos are not likely to be bullish on IMS now'

How is the investment in IMS happening?

The market is still in a flux, and the technology and network rollout are
very expensive. Investment is going on both on the network side as well as the
devices side. Good part is that IMS is a layered architecture, and people with
even small clouts in the IMS space are able to offer services. That is the
strength of the whole architecture, that you can add more and more service over
the same basic network elements.

All the new moves and investments from the Telco's standpoint are moving in
a direction that is IMS compliant. The core of investment around IMS is likely
to happen in 2007, where the new network elements are likely to be deployed.
Since it is a modular architecture, investment will not be in one go.

Where will investment on IMS be-more in hardware or software?

Investment will mainly be in software. Of course you need the hardware but
next-generation hardware and architecture is coming into place independent of
IMS. Internationally, in the last 2-3 years there have been major investments by
telcos in the advanced ATCA architecture. So it is very likely that the
next-generation architecture will be developed over ATCA hardware platform using
the IMS architecture on the core network. But IMS is primarily about software.
It does not mandate a particular hardware.

How optimistic are you that telcos will promote non-voice services even if
they have the infrastructure for it?

The same is happening with 3G. Everybody knows that eventually it will be
services that will drive the revenues. IMS is basically a hope in that
direction. Though IMS may not offer any new service now, it provides a framework
for providing cheaper services in a faster manner. However, India is likely to
be driven more by basic needs first and we are likely to be behind the developed
market by about two years, in terms of IMS services. Because every body wants to
make and recover money, telcos may concentrate on how they can provide a cheaper
solution to provide basic connectivity. Banking more on services is likely to be
more successful in saturated markets, or in small islands like Delhi or
Bangalore, so telcos are not likely to be bullish on IMS now. When the volumes
pick up, there would be national rollouts.

What is the market for infrastructure software in India?

The market is hot in India, not from an IMS perspective but from a basic
infrastructure growth perspective. Our customers like Motorola, Nortel, and
Ericsson make complex switches. They buy hardware, buy protocol software from us
and develop various applications, which are going to be dominantly around 3G and
2.5G, or 3G and IMS in the next 12-15 months. We will be making money on the
infrastructure growth side for another couple of years.

By when are IMS services and applications likely to be rolled out in
India?

That date is a moving target, but I will be very surprised if anything
significant happened before two years.

Alok Singh

aloksi@cybermedia.co.in