Clouds and a Post-Carrier Future
Taylor and Lazar know that not all of Metaswitch's current service provider customers will want or need cloud-based appliances such as session border controllers. Nonetheless, Metaswitch's technology has to be cloud-ready, and there is perhaps another set of customers on the horizon for those cloud capabilities, too.
Taylor confirms that Metaswitch is running an instance of the company's Perimeta session border controller on Amazon's EC2 public cloud as a proof of concept. And that's where the Metaswitch story gets really interesting.
John Lazar is loved by his customers here, but he's clearly hedging his bets. In a press room lunch meeting, he talks openly about enabling and selling voice services, SMS and other applications and capabilities to over-the-top providers as part of a cloud service. It's just talk at the moment, but Lazar is worried that not enough of his current customers will innovate fast enough to stay competitive.
"I have to prepare us for the post-carrier future," he explains.
Of course he doesn't mean all carriers will go away. But he does mean that the relationship customers have with what used to be telephone companies will change. That's why he's even discussing, in a room full of reporters, even more far out ideas -- such as that of creating a carrier services store. Like iTunes, but for communications services. He wonders why no one, to date, has become a trusted provider of communications services that consumers or businesses could buy from local or national service providers -- all in a one-stop shop.
Should Metaswitch be in that business? Again, it's talk at this point, but Lazar is perhaps seeing a day down the road where the "switch" in Metaswitch is like the "Telegraph" in AT&T's previous corporate moniker.
"What I'm betting on here is our software heritage," Lazar tells the crowd here during his keynote. "I think we can win."
Agreed, Hosted IP PBX is indeed tough, and trixbox is a very viable market killer already, not to mention the Microsoft or Google free stuff coming. Its more the telephony service, legacy PSTN interface, and knowing telephone products where LEC's have advantage they need to leverage. Indeed, the whole concept of a PBX is likely fading. What remains are customer needs for voice communications, those specialized aps that are used like call fowarding, hunt gorups, auto attendant, find-me-follow-me, etc... and providers who understand both need and solution. Ever watch an IT professional sell a UCM, ugly...
MetaSwitch and LEC's have a symbiotic future, as you aptly allude "both good and ill".
I don't work at Cisco or VMWare and never have. The last company that I worked for that is known here is AFC. I have talked about working in a company that is in the Email Security business as a SaaS vendor.
There are many people in the virtual "Unified Communications" business. Metaswitch for both good and ill will now have a whole new set of competitors. Like Microsoft for example. Not saying that they can't do well, just this is NOT new ground. Heck there are even open source switches in this space.
Dearest brook, you are welcome to call that hardware running switching or routing software whatever you like.I’ll leave that between you and Cisco / VMware.
Of import is Phil’s column and excellent panel discussion at the Metaswitch Forum (kudo’s Phil, well done) on the impact of virtualization on both vendor and service provider.It is far too easy for us to associate a vendor with the hardware they sell, or a service provider with the physical network they operate.As Mr. Lazar and team hammered home, it is our intellect and product awareness of how telephony services are provided, manifested in software for vendors, or business practices for a service provider, where our comparative advantages in the future market resides.Hitherto, placement of our hardware or our geography defined our respective market space.Mr. Lazar clearly sees the need to expand his market through virtualization and his team is enthusiastically coaching service providers to do the same.The same forces are at work with OTT on MVPD’s and Aps on Mobile Wireless Service Providers.
Last year’s Forum highlighted the physical network and pipe, bolstering service providers to transform how they see themselves.This year, MetaSwitch cut the cord between network and service, aware that their customers must do the same.Those centered on the access, the physical network, must seek the support of that ecosystem (a very viable market, ripe with opportunity). Those confident in their telephony service can join MetaSwitch to compete in the cloud.Point being, MetaSwitch can no longer rely on hardware sales to sell their product, and Local Exchange Carriers can no longer rely on telephone service, to sell their access.Virtualization is changing everything.Bernie’s companion commentary (Oct 5, 2012) sums it up well.Time to decide is now.
Ummm...I worked security appliances which were simply x86 servers running FreeBSD or Linux. Routers tend to have things like switch fabrics and specialized high performance I/O. Except at the low end they are definitely NOT appliances. I can not imagine how many Dell Blade Servers would be required to provide the network throughput of a CRS-1.
Redux Cisco. Routers and Switches are just appliances to run their software. Right move for Metaswitch, tough love to their valued customer base; transform with us, or hello telegraph.
The company now called Metaswitch was for years Data Connection Ltd., a software company building protocol code. The original Metaswitch product took a lot of their existing code modules that had gone into other companies' products, filled in some gaps, and created a CO switch that ran entirely on merchant iron. This was simultaneously radical and obvious, a smart place to be.
DCL renamed the company after the product that came to dominate its sales. But it's still a software comany at heart, whose core skill is making things work on commodity hardware. The secret sauce is in support, which they do very well. So it's natural for them to recombine their software modules to address new markets.
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