Las Vegas is a strange place, so much noise and excitement; it’s literally pure sensory overload. The barrage of people, noise, and lights usually makes me long for a quiet place after a short amount of time. To my surprise I actually stumbled upon that very place yesterday right smack in the middle of the CTIA tradeshow! I carved an hour out in my ridiculously busy schedule to attend a session dedicated to an industry status check on IMS, or the IP multimedia subsystem. A few things struck me before the session even started; attendance was sparse [especially taken against other sessions such as Yankee Group’s own standing room only M2M track], and the assembled panel of experts was 100% on the carrier infrastructure side of things.

Now as an analyst, part of the job description is to assemble panels and when we take on that task vendors are usually the first to raise their hands to participate given their natural inclination to “get their story out”. However, a good panel usually balances the “vendor speak” with some demand side representation, in this case I would’ve expected to see at least an operator or two.

The lack of operators on this panel was telling. After some introductions, the panel got down to the business of admitting what we at Yankee Group have been saying for some time. The IMS movement has been severely over-hyped and is presently mired in various obstacles ranging from the technical [too complex, security concerns] to the business side [service providers are still very siloed, lack of killer applications create a business chicken and egg syndrome]. Does the tail between the legs routine from the vendors mean IMS is dead? Surely not, it will happen in fits and starts and operators are currently deploying different parts of IMS to suit their needs. There are clearly some interesting pockets of sunshine which include a strong cable multi-service operator interest in the platform along with AT&T, NTT and BT’s public roll-outs.

What it does mean is that unabashed hype cycle is officially over and we are now in the more pragmatic and difficult phase of building viable business cases and actually making it work.