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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
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