This article was co-written by a member of Dialexia’s R&D team.
The article examines how the IMS architecture is applicable to the enterprise environment, the relevance it has for enterprise users, different options for integrating private and public IMS infrastructures, and the impact of those options on enterprises and IMS service providers. Similarly, the authors review IMS architecture, discuss the requirements of enterprise communications systems, and present four possible architectures for the use of IMS by enterprises. They also consider the possibility of using the service oriented architecture (SOA) to integrate IMS-based enterprise communications systems within enterprise information technology (IT) infrastructure. The authors have built a softswitch prototype based on the IMS architecture. They  describe the implementation and lessons learned from this experience.