Event Minutes

Some final words from the workshop chairman to attendants and observers:

Another big IMS Workshop is now over; the biggest workshop we ever organized at FOKUS with 300 attendants from 33 nations around the world. And this also constitutes it as the biggest IMS event ever.

For two days we hosted both already well known and new faces within what we call the "FOKUS family" at the FOKUS premises to show the state of the art and future research directions in the field of rich communications and media services on top of converging networks.

Two tutorials, four interactive workshops and a one day conference addressed the hottest buzzwords and trends in the field of convergence, namely IMS rollouts, RCS, Common IMS, Telco 2.0, Interactive IPTV, IMS-Web 2.0 Integration, IMS-SDP Integration, Carrier Open Network APIs, IMS clients on Android, IMS interoperability testing, and emerging future internet and services testbed infrastructures.

In addition, we opened our Open SOA Telco Playground and our Media Interoperability Lab to show our newest Telco 2.0 and interactive IPTV applications on top of IMS (demo 1 demo2).

Last but not least we have for the first time "opened the cage" hosting MONSTER - our brand new extendible plug-and-play framework that provides developers a unified communication interface on which they can develop and bring together a suite of integrated applications such as voice, video, instant messaging, chats, communities, news feeds, photo sharing, contacts and much more from the converging telecommunication and Internet domains for multiple target device platforms such as desktop, laptop, set top boxes, Android, the iPhone and others (www.monster-the-client.org).

Below some more information about the different parts:

Tutorial 1 and 2:

Tutorial 1 ("IMS “IMS Basics, Standards Update and Future Challenges in face of Converged Internet/Telecoms”) and Tutorial 2 ("Getting Started with the Open Source IMS Core (OSIMS)") have set the floor for newcomers to the family and have been attended by 170 and 70 delegates, respectively.

Workshop 1:

Workshop 1 ("Understanding the convergence jungle: putting the buzzwords NGN, IMS, SDP, and SOA into the right context" chaired by Prof. T. Margaria, Univ. of Potsdam, and Prof. T. Magedanz, TU Berlin) has been attended by 100 delegates. In two interactive sessions we looked at SOA-based service creation approaches in for converged Telco 2.0 environments (presentations by Institute National des Télécommunications, France, University of Dortmund, NTT, Japan) and on the emerging exposure of operator network APIs towards Web 2.0 developers to stimulate new service ideas (presentations by Telecom Italia, BT UK, Vodafone Spain, Telefonica Spain, and Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany). The major consensus was that IMS benefits from an integration into SOA-based SDPs and that exposing (via API's) a Telco's core assets to third party developers is a key opportunity for new services, however successful business models are still unclear. Operators probably need to invest in exposing unique network based assets (Profile and authentication where given as most promising examples) asap to stay in the value chain. Finally a potential need for industry action, whether standards or some other co-ordination was raised.

Workshop 2:

Workshop 2 ("IMS and Converged Media Services – Challenges and Opportunities for Operator, Content Provider and Advertising Industry" chaired by Dr. S. Arbanowski, FOKUS and C. Riede, FOKUS) has been attended by 75 delegates. This year´s converged media services track of the FOKUS IMS workshop did address the challenges and opportunities for operators, vendors, content providers and advertising industry in a converged services world. Representatives from all these stakeholders namely Slovak Telekom, Oracle, BBDO, Cisco, IP Deutschland, and Deutsche Welle expressed their views followed by committed discussions with and among the audience. The workshop was attended by more than 70 participants from around the globe. Convergence complemented by comprehensive cross-media strategies have been agreed among the participants to be key market driver. Beside underlying technologies and architectures - as defined by ETSI TISPAN and Open IPTV Forum - Metadata and corresponding search and recommendation functions are seen essential components for future media environments. Those technologies will help to create, manage, find, recommend, distribute, and retrieve personalized rich media on a mass market scale.

Workshop 3:

Workshop 3 ("Open NGN Testbeds – Infrastructure as a Service" chaired by A. Gavras, Eurescom, and S. Wahle, FOKUS and has been attended by 40 delegates. In two sessions, this half day workshop introduced a number of NGN and IMS related testbed initiatives around the globe. Furthermore, the more general topic of experimental facilities and testbed federation abstracting von concrete technologies was addressed in particular during the second session. A panel, facilitating the discussion with the speakers, concluded the workshop. The speakers and panelists presented ideas from industry and academia including a keynote from a European Commission representative.

Workshop 4:

Workshop 4 (“IMS/NGN Interoperability” chaired by Prof. I. Schieferdecker, TU Berlin, and P. Weik, FOKUS) has been attended by 50 delegates. The workshop consisted of three parts: in the first, IMS bodies presented their concepts on IMS interoperability and end-to-end testing. The second part of the workshop was dedicated to test vendor offers. At the end, all presenters took part in the panel on IMS/NGN interoperability issues. In conclusion, all presenters agreed that IMS/NGN interoperability is a major milestone towards the deployment of IMS infrastructures and that IMS/NGN testing provides the central mean to check and assure interoperability. If we will see IMS/NGN certificates in the near future will depend on the network and service provider requirements and/or on some form of regulation or self-control of the IMS industry.

Social event:

The social event on Thursday performed at an old closed water pump station (Wasserwerk) in central Berlin allowed the growing "FOKUS family" to continue discussions and to come to know new friends.

Conference:

The conference on Friday had attracted 290 attendants. About 25 globally recognized experts (mainly operators) from all over the world reported about the current deployment of IMS platforms and services provided with IMS in Europe and around the globe. It somehow become apparent that IMS is getting real in the field and is foreseen for many FMC, RCS, and Triple Play services, however, most of the operators currently use IMS mainly for VoIP. A Vendor Panel discussed how important IMS is currently in their day by day business. It also seemed that there are not too many alternative solutions to IMS - besides potentially vanilla SIP infrastructures - however, security and interoperability may be more challenging. A final session has outlined new research directions towards market oriented service infrastructures and the setup of European future experimental research facilities for future internet architectures, protocols, services. A final panel discussed the Challenges of NGN in the context of emerging Multimedia Internet Services and new Business Models.

In addition, eight of the eleven sponsors have shown their IMS/NGN related products and allowed the audience to obtain a snapshot of IMS compliant products.

We would like to thank all the sponsors, supporters, the chairmen and of course the workshop and conference speakers for all their efforts making this event a high caliber technical forum. And finally we want to thank all the attendants for their interest and discussions. We hope you have made new interesting contacts and gained some inspirations for your future work.

We hope to see you again - if you attended the event - or for the first time - if you are an observer of our work - next year, either at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain (www.mobileworldcongress.com) at the Fraunhofer booth (in Hall 1-0, Booth 1G49) in February 16-19, 2009, where we finally let MONSTER out of the cage and release it to the general public, or hopefully again at the 5th anniversary FOKUS International IMS Workshop in Berlin in November 2009. Thus mark your calendars and stay tuned for more details.

The FOKUS IMS team wishes you a successful business for 2009 and beware of the MONSTER ...

Prof. T. Magedanz and the FOKUS IMS team

The FOKUS IMS team