5th Fraunhofer FOKUS IMS Workshop 2009 (November 23, 2009)

A few days after this year’s Fraunhofer FOKUS IMS Workshop has been closed, let me tell about my impressions. This was the last year of the IMS Workshop in its current form; as FOKUS’ head, Prof. Thomas Magedanz has put it, “conference scope grows and ‘IMS’ start being just an umbrella term”. It is very likely that the event will continue further as a series of conferences showcasing FOKUS work.

Just like the last year, the conference has attracted participants from top telecom companies and standardizing organizations from all over the world. Interesting enough, the main focus of the conference has shifted. Instead of the walled garden, as some critics nicknamed the IMS architecture, most of the discussions were about open APIs of different sorts. From Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden (this very interesting and ambitious project aiming to provide paid access to DT’s infrastructure for developers has been rolled out in just around a year) to BONDI (attempt to standardize device API to give developers unified access to the device’s resources): different projects showed a great amount of interest in acquiring third-party developers. This trend clearly shows that the future of the telcos’ NGNs and the set of services they are to provide will be determined by community of developers or by ecosystem of startups supported by telco, and not by a telco itself.

Not only the openness was the hot topic. Over the years FOKUS shows the ability to respond to the industry needs in a very flexible manner. For example this year among the technical demos was the full-blown IaaS/PaaS solution. The virtual slices hosting FOKUS’ OpenIMS were moved around, resized, and reconfigured on the fly. As IMS itself (I will cite Prof. Magedanz again) became “vintage in regard to real research challenges, although there are still a lot of open deployment and integration issues”, the mentioned FOKUS solutions are capable of providing the base for necessary “openness” and “flexibility” of the future telecom.