4th Fraunhofer FOKUS IMS Workshop 2008 (November 16, 2008)

Last week I visited the Fraunhofer FOKUS institute in Berlin, as they were holding annual IMS workshop. This is the biggest IMS event in the industry — this year it has attracted around 300 participants and speakers, including decision makers from the top tier companies like BT or Deutsche Telekom. It was great to witness the event run by an organization so well recognized, and participate in discussions led by people so well informed.

My impressions of the workshop are two-fold. On one hand, the telecom industry keeps being depressive: operators are being more and more pushed out of the service (and revenue) delivery chain; numerous innovations of Web 2.0 are turning out to be impossible to reproduce in the telcos, and so on. On the other hand, FOKUS institute itself has always been very consistent with delivering the real result in the form of innovative software (the most obvious examples could be Open IMS Core, Open SOA Playground including a very rich set of components, and Monster client platform, all of which were impressively demostrated at the workshop), and seeing this progress over last few year could be more than inspiring.

When talking about operators, it is clear that they are aiming at having the developers community around their set of APIs — the lessons of Web 2.0 were learned very well. Telefónica’s Luís Ángel Galindo presented an interesting list of resources traditionally owned by telcos (advanced voice-based capabilitites, messaging, location), which now slowly shifts away from them (for example, with location-aware phones becoming more and more ubiquitous, Skype and SIP providers on the rise, etc). In Spain, Telefónica launched the developer’s portal (Spanish only), and playground for convergent applications as part of their open APIs initiative. Just as well as Deutsche Telekom did. Their Senior Vice President, Thomas Mörsdorf pointed that one of the business models they see with APIs exposed is having their services injected in Web 2.0 applications. The example was real estate agency web site with the built-in “Dial” links; pressing the link would mean more minutes sold by the operator and more real estate sold by agency.

Despite all this, real-world demonstrations held by FOKUS institute during the whole workshop left no doubts that IMS is not a failure. Using only the XPOSER rule engine bundled with their Open SOA product, Fraunhofer team demostrated implementation of three different business models. Three “operators” were deployed: the budget one with advertisements, the business-oriented one with advanced conference facilities, and the third one, providing location-aware services. Services were impressive. For example, location was used to locate the shared media on the map using already mentioned Monster; video captured by the phone were uploaded to the media server and streamed to the buddies on demand; YouTube links were sent to the IMS core, resulting in on-the-fly video transcoding and streaming in a newly opened video sessions.

In short, the event was fascinating and I am looking forward to visit it again next year.