Based on its IMS strategies survey, IHS, a research company said that although at present only 8% of service providers run their IMS network elements in a network functions virtualization (NFV) environment, more service providers are on the path to do so. These service providers are starting to utilize software running on commercial off-the-shelf hardware as a stepping stone to full NFV, according to IHS. In addition, 80 percent of respondents indicated that parts of their IMS elements will be running in an NFV environment by 2017.
IHS said that presently, 60 percent to 65 percent of respondents are running residential voice over broadband, SIP trunking or hosted business VoIP over IMS, growing to 88 percent by 2017. IHS added that Telephony application servers (TAS) are an important element to commercializing an IMS network, where 72 percent of respondents have already installed voice application servers.
Diane Myers, research director for VoIP, UC and IMS at IHS.
One of the biggest drivers for NFV is the ability to scale services up and down quickly and introduce new network services more efficiently and in a timely manner, which makes IMS a good early fit for NFV.
