Introducing IMS as a Service

Enter Project Clearwater. Their claim: “Clearwater is an open source implementation of IMS designed from the ground up for massively scalable deployment in the Cloud to provide voice, video and messaging services to millions of users. Clearwater combines the economics of over-the-top style service platforms with the standards compliance expected of telco-grade communications network solutions, and its Cloud-oriented design makes it extremely well-suited for deployment in a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environment.” 

Clearwater has percolated for a few years and now implementations are being released into the market via member’s product deployments. Among the advances in IMS driven by Clearwater is a clean and powerful implementation of the IMS data model. Its architecture adapts stateless design patterns suited for virtual server implementation. SIP to service interfaces are RESTful and planed for deployment as clustered nodes. Clearwater is not fully IMS as many traditional implementers know IMS: SIP state transactions are maintained as paired proxy agents linked to telephony application servers. It is almost 100% native cloud, but full device independence is not yet practical given the equipment on the market today. But the direction is clear.

The forthcoming cloud-based Metaswitch implementation of Clearwater is, for practical purposes, IMS plus. It extends service interfaces to "web-based" REST operations. State exists in the clients. It uses cloud technology to provide for scalability and redundancy. Distributed computing technologies such as GigaSpaces are partnering to provide what looks like the infinitely scalable future of IMS, capable of monitoring "billions and billions" of devices. IMS is becoming decoupled from core network devices. Metaswitch is not alone. Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia) was providing RESTful interfaces for controlling messaging and calling via IMS. This is associated with virtual appliance APIs. Several traditional IT companies are looking at Clearwater to provide their entry into Digital Convergence.

Clearwater is native cloud, and open source, but other developments suggest that we are going to see existing proprietary IMS implementations ported to the Cloud in much the way pre-cloud applications are converted or ported into virtualized Cloud services. This may well be the most cost-effective way for existing, non-Clearwater IMS vendors to leverage their products into the hands of cloud-oriented providers.

IMS as a Cloud service makes total sense in the virtual, SDN/NFV environment. IMS in the Cloud is, simply, a Virtualized Network Function. IMS was conceived as a model for implementation inside a specific carrier’s environment, with added ways to ensure carrier interoperability. But with IMS virtualized, decoupled, and in the cloud, plus set up to flexibly support whatever IP services it’s asked to support, it’s conceivable that IMS functionality could be sold as a service..

And it’s reasonable that some OTT service providers with valuable customers could be persuaded to buy it. They would be buying functionality they need: authentication, security, QoS, and most uniquely, the ability to interact securely with any other IMS-connected service provider. With IMS they would be able to reach the bit-carriers’ SDN and NFV data centers as well as enable interaction with other OTT provider capabilities, such as cloud and other IoT meshes. In cloud parlance, this is a path to the visionary IEEE InterCloud.

If OTT service providers become customers for IMSaaS, it could lead to a unified global approach that would not just enable people to make good-quality phone calls to anyone. We could also engage networks of  “things” to communicate in a global, well-defined environment that is secure, managed, reliable, consistent and … [per action, per device] inexpensive.

With the open source community and the wider IT industry jumping into IMS advancement and pushing IMS into a virtualized environment only loosely coupled to the network, we will be able to watch an interesting market evolution take place. IMS has the potential to become the common framework for the myriad new technologies that will define the future of telecom: a common resource for all who are “carrier grade” serious about the services they deliver.

Will our industry take a fresh view of IMS and think of it as a business evolution opportunity, not just another network function? If so, who will move first: carriers or vendors? Or will Over the Top companies, feeling the need to take more control over the evolution of the networks they use, leverage IMS to squeeze more of the service market from telecom? Interesting decisions ahead for every member of the telecom ecosystem.