By Christopher J. Kardish, Principal Research Analyst, Nemertes Research

Sept. 15, 2006

Three deals by mobile infrastructure vendors this week demonstrate the growing acceptance of IMS by the industry as a whole:

*Lucent's [NYSE:LU, http://www.lucent.com/] agreement to resell Westell's [NASDAQ:WSTL, http://www.westell.com] TriLink IMS gateway.

*Lucent's acquisition of privately held Mobilitec, provider of content-management software for wireless service providers.

*Sybase's [NYSE:SY, http://www.sybase.com/] acquisition of privately held Mobile 365, a mobile enterprise software and services provider.

What is IMS? IMS stands for IP Multimedia Subsystem. It is a standardized architecture for providing any services across IP networks, mobile or fixed. Why do we care? First, IMS is an industry-driven standard, based on the market accepted Internet Protocol (IP). Cellular companies plan to use IMS to provide VOIP over their data service, permitting concurrent access to the Internet, effectively making cell carriers ISPs.

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