NexTone Supports IMS Migration with IMX Platform, IBM Integration

NexTone Communications this week introduced its IP Multimedia Exchange (IMX) platform, which is designed to enable seamless interconnectivity between 3G mobile, VoIP and IMS-based networks.

NexTone’s Vice President of Marketing Dan Dearing says the new platform is designed to help carriers approach IMS in an incremental way. “It gives them a way to gradually shift from what they are doing today, which is voice over IP services, toward providing a much broader set of application including multimedia applications,” he says. “The IMX is a platform that is a key step in the roadmap to IMS.”

While NexTone’s RMS, or Real-time Management Server, would sit in the center of an IMS-compliant network to provide the call session control functionality (CSCF), the IMX platform operates at the network edge to provide connectivity between networks and enable subscriber roaming, he explains.

“It’s all about subscriber roaming,” Dearing says, adding IMX provides the policy from a security and QoS standpoint necessary to implement this type of service. “Because you are allowing subscribers to roam, it has to support not only voice over IP, but also mobile gaming, chat, presence and IM – other real-time applications.

Specifically, IMX is a very specialized session border controller platform that handles functions such as transcoding of wireless and wireline codecs, network address translation between the different types of IP addresses like IPv4 to IPv6, and SIP interoperability.

“Once carriers have a seamless infrastructure between existing wireline VoIP networks and mobile networks, what the next step will be is offering additional services to users within that environment,” says Dearing. “That’s really where the strength of IMS comes into play. That is the ability to quickly add new applications, to quickly add new services and to be able to reach the larges number of users possible, which is facilitated by the integration of these two environments.”

Indeed, NexTone’s RMS is at the heart of a demo of online gaming and VoIP-to-IMS interconnectivity presented at SUPERCOMM by IBM and its IMS ecosystem partners. NexTone’s RMS, which is software on a blade in IBM’s BladeCenter, provides the CSCF for the demo. It also provides the Service Capability Interaction Module (SCIM), which manages the interface between the CSCF and the IMS services layer.

“[IBM] also has a large number of ready-made applications provided by their ecosystem partners that can quickly slot into their BladeCenter. Once carriers have chosen BladeCenter as their preferred platform, they have an easy way to try and insert new applications into their networks.”

Dearing says the IBM relationship will help NexTone’s existing customers with a clear migration path to IMS networks. “If you look at some of our customers like [New Global Telecom] and DeltaThree they are already positioning their networks for IMS. They are using voice over IP as the proving grounds for that. They are supporting multiple business models today that are voice focused on this IMS-like architecture. But more importantly it lays the foundation for additional applications, additional services in the future,” he says. “We believe a lot of those will come out of the IBM relationship because it will facilitate the easy expansion and low-risk expansion of these networks.”

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines

Read Comments [0]