The IMS
Forum’s fourth IMS Plugfest event, to be held February 25-29, 2008, at the University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Lab in Durham, N.C., has been expanded to include billing and OSS/BSS support for IMS.
The IMS Forum Plugfests are industry networking events which bring together dozens of industry-leading IMS vendors to collaborate and work on projects together. For a period of five days, programmers and software developers from around the world build real, full-featured IMS networks which are tested after completion. By giving these vendors access to multi-vendor interoperability test beds, leading test equipment, IMS cores and applications, as well as multi-protocol engineering expertise, they can speed product development and help ensure interoperability between their products. They can also reduce time-to-market and acceptance testing cycles by pinpointing bugs and conformance issues.
In addition, these vendors can have their products and services validated by a respected industry organization, while working out of a respected third-party lab. Thus, these Plugfests serve as the initial “proving ground” for industry-recognized certification for IMS applications and services interoperability.
The IMS Forum and the UNH IOL will hold an open house and round table conference on Feb 28 to allow IMS service providers, analysts, equipment vendors and system integrators to witness IMS Plugfest IV live. The open house will also include a live demonstration of IMS benchmarking. The round table will be moderated by Ronald Gruia, principal analyst, emerging telecoms, at Frost and Sullivan.
HP and Amdocs (
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Alert) are participating in Plugfest IV, for the first time, along with other well-known vendors working in the IMS space, including Acision, Alpha Networks, Aricent , Data Connection, Empirix, Mavenir Systems, Mu Security, NextPoint Networks, Radvision, Shenick Network Systems, Sonus Networks, Starent Networks, Tekelec and UNH-IOL (
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Alert). Intel is a Platinum sponsor of the event. Media sponsors include
IMS Magazine and Pulvermedia.
"Seamless deployment of IMS applications with the charging components are critical to the commercial success of IMS architecture,” said Ajay Gupta, Aricent vice president of the Wireless, Convergence (
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Alert) and Datacom business unit, said in a press release. “Our Plugfest IV participation with other members from the IMS industry would be a significant step in meeting the needs of equipment manufacturers and service providers for bringing in well-tested, seamlessly integrated, feature-rich IMS -based applications to market quickly.”
“The level of IMS interoperability is growing rapidly and as a result for Plugfest IV we are working with five test plans covering the IMS Core network, Core Class Applications, Messaging, Fixed-Mobile Convergence, Multimedia Applications and Charging,” added Michael Khalilian (
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Alert), Chairman and President of IMS Forum.
The IMS Forum is a global, non-profit industry association devoted to interoperable IP
Multimedia Subsystem services delivery architecture and solutions. Its mission is to accelerate the interoperability of IMS revenue-generating services and enabling enterprise and residential consumers to fully benefit from the delivery of multimedia mobile and fixed services over broadband cable, wireless, wireline and fiber networks.
For more information, visit
www.imsforum.org.
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