Lucent's Giere Comments on IMS and Cultural Change

In a recent blog entry, Rich Tehrani called attention to some comments by John Giere, chief marketing officer at Lucent Technologies, about the migration to an IMS (IP multimedia subsystem)-based communications architecture.

Giere's comments are summarized near the end of an article, "Crossing the convergence chasm," about the commitment to IMS made by AT&T, BellSouth and Cingular Wireless, all of whom are working with Lucent as primary vendor. Giere's comments clicked with me, not in relation to IMS and how it works, but in terms of what IMS will make possible in delivering services to customers.

I recently wrote about the launch of a mobile video messaging service called TxtBIG, and, while I can see that the service could have interest to consumers, it's hard to imagine that this would be a service people would use every day and pay a fee for. So it seems obvious that this would have to be offered as one feature of a much larger package including mobile video, music downloads, games, ring tones and probably many other services nobody has imagined yet.

Giere's comments kind of confirm my thinking on this and show how IMS will help make multiple services available as part of a subscription-based package:

"John Giere, Lucent chief marketing officer, said that's why the transition to IMS will be gradual, not because of technology constraints, but because of cultural ones. IMS, he said, is the technology face of a larger trend: the transition from a service-model based on time to one based on subscription. As IMS blends numerous applications and features together, charging for each individual feature becomes not only a challenge for the carrier but a headache for the user to track. Giere said services will be sold as lifestyle-based models, allowing customers to access pools of related and closely linked services for a flat fee. Though IMS is not only the preferred technology to handle such a model, he said, it may be the only technology that could pull it off."

In a world of converged media based on Internet protocol, it makes less and less sense to base pricing on numbers of minutes. A flat-rate subscription seems like the logical model. This also came up in my blog entry last week about Skype's partnership with Hutchison 3. Hutchison plans to make Skype calling available over its 3G network as part of a flat-rate subscription plan.

What Giere is saying about "lifestyle-based models" makes infinitely better sense than forcing consumers to choose among a growing menu of services and then have to track all the details of usage and fees.

AB -- 2/22/06