Voice and video continue to anchor real-time communication for enterprises and consumers, even as investment attention shifts toward data-centric services. Operators already deliver carrier-grade voice and video at scale. The pressure now comes from a different direction. Teams must evolve these services at a pace that aligns with enterprise buying behavior and application-driven consumption models.
What has changed is not demand for real-time communications, but where value accrues. In 2024 and 2025, enterprise communications spending has increasingly shifted away from standalone UC licenses toward voice and video embedded directly inside business applications. Healthcare platforms, logistics workflows, financial services onboarding, and customer engagement systems now consume communications as infrastructure, not as end-user services. This shift compresses the window in which operators can reposition voice and video from retail offerings into programmable network capabilities.
In traditional IMS solution environments, teams operate within tightly coupled architectures. Call control, service logic, and media processing remain embedded across vendor-specific components. This structure delivers predictability and stability. Over time, however, it fixes service behavior deep inside the stack.
Once service logic becomes embedded, innovation follows vendor release cycles instead of business intent. Each enhancement requires professional services engagement, coordinated upgrades, and regression testing across the IMS stack. As a result, new service capabilities take 12 to 18 months to reach production, even when market needs it much much earlier.
This gap increasingly translates into missed revenue rather than customer churn. By the time IMS-delivered capabilities reach production, enterprise buyers have often adopted CPaaS or cloud-native alternatives that integrate faster with their applications. Those decisions embed communications dependencies at the application layer—dependencies that are difficult for operators to displace later, regardless of network quality or pricing.
While IMS programs move in quarterly milestones, competitors introduce incremental capabilities on a monthly cadence. Enterprise customers experience this gap directly. Unified communications, integrated video, and application-level voice features evolve faster than IMS platforms can respond. Operators retain network reach and reliability, yet struggle to meet expectations created by faster-moving ecosystems.
Why Legacy IMS Architecture Breaks Economics at Scale
The constraint becomes more visible when teams attempt service bundling. Combining voice, video, messaging, and 5G differentiation requires integration across multiple systems. These integrations operate on quarterly cycles, making real-time coordination with network slicing impractical. The limitation does not sit in the radio or the core. It sits in how IMS architecture absorbs change.
Architecture also defines economics. Embedded IMS designs force teams to size infrastructure for peak concurrent usage across all services. Capacity planning assumes worst-case scenarios rather than observed demand. Average utilization settles around 30 to 40 percent, locking capital into unused capacity before revenue models are validated.
From a finance perspective, this underutilization represents stranded capital rather than technical inefficiency. Infrastructure investments are committed before demand signals are proven, flattening margins even as traffic grows. This dynamic explains why many operators see IMS operating costs rise faster than IMS revenue, despite relatively stable voice and video usage volumes.
Revenue flexibility suffers under the same constraints. Pricing granularity depends on vendor-level code customization. Introducing service variants or differentiated enterprise offerings often requires parallel infrastructure deployments instead of configuration changes. Teams cannot adapt service behavior dynamically to support partnerships, usage-based models, or vertical-specific offerings.
Over time, this rigidity produces duplication. Dedicated systems emerge for different service types and customer segments. Monitoring, upgrades, and capacity planning multiply. Operational cost grows to roughly twice the infrastructure cost, not because traffic increases, but because fragmentation becomes structural.
Cloud-Native IMS as a Structural Reset for Service Velocity and Economics
Cloud-native IMS introduces a different operating model. Teams decompose session control, media processing, and user data into independent components. APIs replace embedded logic as the primary integration mechanism. Control moves out of vendor code paths and into programmable layers that teams can evolve internally.
This shift changes how services reach the market. Teams build capabilities through internal development cycles rather than vendor change requests. They assemble voice and video services by orchestrating exposed functions instead of modifying platforms. Release timelines compress from quarters to weeks, aligning IMS execution with modern product development practices.
This transition effectively shifts IMS from a fixed-cost infrastructure model to a variable-cost platform model. Operators can validate new enterprise offerings in-market before committing large-scale capacity, reducing risk while accelerating time to revenue.
Capacity economics shift at the same time. Independent components scale based on actual usage patterns. Session control, media processing, and signaling expand and contract independently. Infrastructure aligns with observed demand rather than peak assumptions. Operators typically reduce total capacity requirements by 35 to 45 percent through aggregate scaling.
Multi-tenancy becomes viable without operational sprawl. Teams run shared infrastructure while enforcing isolation through policy and slicing. MVNOs and wholesale partners define independent service behavior on the same platform. Operations remain centralized. One team manages vendors, upgrades, and refresh cycles, while cost scales with tenant volume instead of organizational complexity.
From Subscriber Services to Programmable Communications Platforms
As service logic externalizes through APIs, teams expose communications capabilities directly to third-party developers. Healthcare platforms embed voice consultations. Logistics systems integrate real-time video verification. Financial applications add secure calling and identity workflows. Communications shift from subscriber-bound services to programmable network capabilities.
In practice, leading operators are no longer monetizing voice minutes—they are monetizing outcomes. Healthcare providers pay per completed consultation, logistics platforms tie video calls to proof-of-delivery events, and financial institutions embed programmable calling into KYC and fraud prevention workflows. In each case, IMS becomes invisible infrastructure: consumed via APIs, billed by usage, and valued for reliability rather than feature breadth.
Monetization models evolve accordingly. Platform fees and usage-based charging complement or replace per-minute billing. Voice and video move closer to infrastructure products than retail services, aligning revenue with how enterprises consume communication.
This shift also defines the competitive landscape. Hyperscalers and CPaaS providers already monetize programmable communications, but lack direct control over network policy, quality, and regulatory compliance. Cloud-native IMS allows operators to compete where others cannot—combining developer economics with carrier-grade control, lawful intercept, and SLA-backed performance.
Aligning IMS with 5G Network Control to Enable Policy-Driven Services
Cloud-native IMS also aligns IMS execution with 5G control mechanisms. Teams coordinate call establishment with slice management systems. Slice assignment reflects service intent at setup. Codec selection, resolution, and media handling adapt dynamically based on network conditions and policy. Voice and video sessions operate as native 5G services rather than isolated workloads.
The business implication is differentiation at call setup rather than after degradation occurs. Enterprises can request latency, reliability, or media quality characteristics programmatically, and operators can price those characteristics dynamically. Voice and video stop being flat services and become policy-driven 5G network products.
The Market Shift Operators Can No Longer Ignore
These architectural shifts coincide with a broader market forcing function. Operators no longer reposition infrastructure through single cutover events. Teams migrate IMS traffic in controlled phases over four to six months, validating performance while limiting operational risk.
At the same time, enterprise buying behavior continues to shift. Communications increasingly embed inside business applications rather than existing as standalone services. Buyers prioritize scale, integration flexibility, and carrier-grade reliability over feature catalogs.
This creates a strategic divide. Retail communication services face margin pressure and slower innovation cycles, while infrastructure platforms that enable ecosystems support higher growth, stickier enterprise relationships, and stronger valuation narratives.
This shift creates a clear strategic divide. Retail communication services face margin pressure and slower innovation cycles. Infrastructure platforms that enable ecosystems support higher growth and stronger valuation narratives.
The underlying question becomes architectural rather than commercial. Can the network support an infrastructure provider role as enterprise communications embed directly into applications?
Cloud-native IMS provides the foundation for that role. It allows teams to monetize 5G voice and video as scalable, programmable infrastructure aligned with enterprise consumption patterns, without sacrificing reliability or operational control.
Contact us to get an expert-led analysis of your IMS modernization path. We combine real-world operator experience with a deep understanding of 5G and enterprise communications. The outcome for you is faster monetization, stronger service agility, and improved capital efficiency.
