Calling vendors with IMS products: I need your help.

Specifically, I need you to step up to the plate and produce some case studies that demonstrate that IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) isn’t just hype – that it can actually deliver on its promises of enabling telecom operators to generate additional revenues at the same time as cutting costs

I’m making this plea because a project I’ve been working on appears to have come to a bit of a grinding halt.

It began at Globalomm in June when I met the CEO of Metaswitch Networks , John Lazar, and we got chatting about current trends. Lazar said that people were tired of technical discussions about IMS; they wanted know what IMS could do for them, from a business perspective.

This struck a chord with me, and I came up with the idea of Light Reading creating a sort of online album of IMS case studies. Each case study would be a page, and would follow the same format, so that vendors could submit a project by simply filling in a form and sending it in with a diagram. Light Reading would create a Web page from it. We’d keep on adding case studies, one per page, indefinitely, and create an indexing system so that readers could find projects that might match what they were planning.

To cut a long story short, everybody loved the idea, so I went away and got Tim Hills, a regular author of Light Reading reports, to work with Metaswitch to come up with a draft form for vendors to complete in order to submit a case study for posting on Light Reading.

Next step is putting a few examples of case studies into the form to see whether it would work. Hence this column, inviting all vendors to come up with case studies of IMS being implemented in real-life networks. If hardly anybody comes forward, I think it will prove something, don’t you?

By the way, I would also like to get some feedback on the draft form, which you may examine here. Get in touch if you’d like to help. I’m at [email protected].

— Peter Heywood, Founding Editor, Light Reading