About this Year's Event

In this year´s event we introduce for the first time four complete parallel tracks on the first day, each one featuring its own tutorial in the morning and interactive workshop in the afternoon. All topics are closely related and any combination of tutorials and workshops is possible and encouraged. A joint evening event will allow cross track discussions, networking and establishment of new friendships. The following conference day unites all these addressed topics under the banner of IMS and SDP evolution in view of the emerging Future Internet. Nevertheless, also first feedback from real IMS deployments and IMS service launches will be given and discussed in view of potential alternative solutions.

So what can you expect from these two days?

The many questions around IMS are no doubt primarily based on the inherent complexity of the convergence of telecommunications and the internet, which at the bottom layer is not only an issue of technology integration and replacement, but also - much more fundamentally - an issue of changing value chains and related business modeling. Over the top service and content providers gain momentum and equipment / end system providers are actively joining this strategy. In view of mushrooming Web 2.0 services also the development and seamless provision of value added services and content itself will move increasingly out of the network posing new requirements onto the network operators and the related service platforms. Ultimately, with the upcoming launch of LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile networks, VoIP and interactive multimedia services will hit also the mobile world. IMS in this regard is just a small but important piece of a much more complicated equation.

In these two days we want to address the following issues:

1. The Rich Communications and Telco 2.0 Track:
   Will RCS hit the market right in time?
   What are the promising service enablers of the future?
   Linking communications and content.
   Will service bundling happen inside or outside the network?
   How to bundle/orchestrate services?
   Experiences from Open network operator APIs.
   Comparison of different App Store concepts.
2. The IPTV & Media Convergence Track:
   What role will interactive TV and multimedia content play?
   About the integration of all media types.
   From broadcast to unicast and VoD.
   What role will profiling and recommendations play?
   Towards advertising and eCommerce.
3. The Future Internet Track:
   How far away is the Future Internet?
   Overview of Future Internet research activities.
   What will the Future Internet bring?
   Will P2P do better than IMS?
   Service driven overlays.
   Dynamic service composition.
   Clean slate versus evolution.
   Autonomic communications and distributed intelligence.

4. The Next Generation Mobile Network & Evolved Packet Core (EPC) Track:
   Getting an understanding of the fundamental Next Generation Mobile Network related technologies, such as LTE and EPC forming the EPS.
   Understand the technical and business roll out challenges
   Learn about the potential role of IMS in Next Generation Mobile Networks
   Experience the upcoming FOKUS OpenEPC

On Wednesday morning four parallel tutorials will introduce the state of the art and issues of each track theme and will enable newcomers to the topic to get up to speed and be prepared for the subsequent workshops.

Wednesday afternoon features four parallel interactive workshops with 5-6 stimulus presentations for each track from well known experts and then allow the participants to present their ideas and to start a vivid discussion about the specific subject matters.

An interesting evening event allows continuing the potentially hot debates of the afternoon in a more relaxed atmosphere. We know it will be tough to top the previous social events, but be assured, you will be impressed again.

The following conference day (Thursday) will put the different tracks into a common context and present from an industry perspective the current state of the art in NGN infrastructure rollout and service plans, where mainly operators are presenting their views in presentations, and vendors will add their views in a dedicated panel.

Alongside the workshops and the conference we will have again a vendor exhibition showing the state of the art of NGN technologies and applications, as well as new service demonstrations from the FOKUS technology playgrounds. More details about these demos and the sponsors/exhibitors will be made available in the near future.