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NewsGlobe: Currents
Working groups working together
IMS Forum and IMTC sign MOU to push interoperability efforts
by Jim Barthold
Two leading organizations working on IMS interoperability
have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to
collaborate on the development and deployment of IMS
applications and services across mobile, fixed and cable
broadband networks, including client interoperability.
As part of the agreement, the IMS Forum, which focuses on
interoperability at the applications and services layer, and the
International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium
(IMTC), a group looking at issues surrounding IMS client
interoperability, will establish technical and marketing liaisons
to exchange information in IMS specifications, testing and
interoperability and share testing best practices. This includes
collaborating on technical documents and working on future
joint testing events.
“It’s just a natural move for both forums to work together and
hopefully we’ll get more forums to join us,” said Manuel
Vexler, chairman of the technical working group at the IMS
Forum.
While some companies are members of both organizations,
the organizations’ areas of focus are distinct enough to
require an MOU, said Anatoli Levine, chairman of the IMTC.
“We work a lot with the companies that produce clients for
videoconferencing,” said Levine, pointing out that the IMTC
has an IMS activity group. “We address the client side,
making sure all the clients can interoperate and produce good
quality video. The IMS Forum is focusing on working on the
servers.”
Together, the two organizations hope to establish a “base
level of interoperability and see that everything works
together,” said Levine. “Then we can move onto the next
stage which would be a big joint event. It’s easier to embrace
more focused areas at this point in time as this technology is
being formed.”
IMS, which is a foundation for interoperability between fixed
and mobile platforms, has been slow to develop. Groups like IMS
Forum and IMTC have taken a proactive role with vendors to
push product and technology interoperability and provide
feedback to standards organizations.
“In real life you enjoy the fruits of the labor when you make a
call from a Polycom video end point and the person on the
other side uses Sony or Tandberg and in the middle there is
Cisco,” Levine said, pointing to past videoconferencing
successes. “This is where consortia like IMTC or IMS Forum
come into play because we bring engineers from competing
companies together.”
The consortia, are, of course, cognizant that IMS is, as Levine
put it, “a development technology. We need to focus on the
client and the IMS Forum focuses on working on the servers.”
This base level of interoperability sharing will, both
organizations hope, speed overall progress.
“We want to make it work from end-to-end, left-to-right and
right to left,” Levine concluded.
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