The IMS Lantern: JAIN SLEE

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

The Beatles & The Stones

The summary of a new report by Light Reading titled Telco Web 2.0 Mashups: A New Blueprint for Service Creation makes me think of the Beatles v. Stones battle.

Obviously, in the 60's the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were foes to death, and history can tell that only one of these two bands was great. Which one?

The report apparently highlights the need for operators to rapidly embrace a web services and service mashups approach. Fine, I totally agree with this.

My problem is when IMS and SIP are presented as an alternative to this approach. In this report this is clearly the bad one, as everybody knows that you cannot implement both web services and SIP/IMS and combine the two for an optimal usage.

When will the industry stop looking for the silver bullet? The unique technical solution, the unique business model that will answer all problems?

A core thesis I am trying to develop in this blog is that SOA/web services and IMS/SIP can be combined together to form a new paradigm (User Oriented Architecture) which, like the bands cited above would be more than the sum of its parts.

Another summary of the report cites JAIN SLEE as the service creation/execution environment in the context of IMS. I like JAIN SLEE and I think it can play an interesting role in IMS and across IMS and other networks.

However, it would be more interesting if the summary mentioned Java EE (J2EE) as well, as it could show that the Web Services / SIP picture is not that black and white. J2EE platforms fit very well in a web services world and I know at least three of the main J2EE platform suppliers which include SIP servlet support at the core of their platform. This means that there exist on the market platforms that can be used to implement services that are both web services and SIP/IMS centric. Unless of course this is strictly forbidden by both IMS and Web Services purists (I already had the opportunity to write about the artificial separation between IMS and Web Services chapels).

Why should the telecom industry just follow the steps of Internet companies and not try to bring its own contribution to the future, by integrating and enriching what exists today?

Christophe

Who I Am

My name is Christophe Gourraud.

I am French and France is the country I currenly live in, after having worked in Canada and in Switzerland.

I have worked for several telecommunications equipment providers and one operator. Involved in 3GPP standardization for IMS and working as a systems architect, I had for years the opportunity to develop ideas about how to use the IMS in an innovative manner. This blog was one of the outlets I used to express these ideas to the telecommunications community. During these years I filed 24 patents for two companies, wrote articles, spoke to conferences and delivered courses.

I am now a student again, having started in September 2014 an Advanced Master in Innovation & Transformation at Ecole Centrale Paris. I have the desire to help companies innovate and transform themselves.

In the next year I will be looking for a job in this complex domain, in the telecommunications sector or outside. So do not hesitate to contact me if you think I may be the right person for your company.

IEEE Article

The March 2007 special issue of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine on IMS features an article I wrote, which is entitled: Using IMS as a Service Framework.

You can order the whole issue or my article.

Here is the introduction of the article:

The eventual value of IMS will be tightly linked to the number, variety and stickiness of services it will support, as well as its ability to accommodate various business models. An operator having invested in IMS should seek to make optimal use of it, which implies not arbitrarily limiting IMS to specific types of services, specific ways to implement them, or specific business models.

IMS should eventually take part in many services related to communication, content and data, not only as the host of some of these services, but also as a mediator and an added-value contributor to services delivered by 3^rd parties possibly located in the Internet.

This article aims to describe, thanks to a few examples, some of the interesting features IMS can offer as a service framework: not just a framework on which new services can be implemented, but also a framework with which numerous existing and future services can be integrated (see the IMS integration tips in the next sections).

The following sections describe the IMS service framework around the three following topics: the capabilities of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) as a service control protocol; IMS service addressing and routing features and the new application layer architecture they can support; the ability of IMS to combine service logic distributed among multiple entities.