Dealing with IMS —€” What an App Developer needs to know

As promised, the slides and recording of last Tuesday's webinar are up on the NMS website. 
Some of the key points: 

• There are strong business and service parallels between the Intelligent Network (IN) and the IP Multimedia Systems (IMS).
• IMS is only being used for new applications, and only a few at that, notably Push to Talk, Video Sharing, Fixed-Mobile Convergence and perhaps, Instant Messaging (although so far that's mostly talk).
• While there's work involved in integrating an application into an IMS network, it's no more complicated than integrating with IN — indeed, the larger issues are usually with OSS/BSS/NMS integration and they are relatively unaffected by IMS.
• Although it would appear that standard IMS infrastructure includes all the necessary components for application control (the Application Server), subscriber data (the Home Subscriber Server) and media processing (the Media Resource Function), most substantial applications end up shipping with their own additional application processors, databases and media resources.  These additional application-specific components need to connect via IMS standard interfaces, but need not (and generally do not) conform to IMS specifications internally.

Based on questions during the webinar, and by email afterward, I've hit on some of the practical issues developers are running into as they migrate existing applications to run in an IMS network.