On June 3, news broke that dramatically changed the telco landscape for many communications service providers: this is the day that Microsoft laid off almost everybody associated with the traditional Metaswitch platform, including sales, sales engineering, professional services, and software developers. In my last blog post, I wrote about how Metaswitch’s end-of-life notice for MaX UC was a clear sign indicating the demise of Metaswitch as a whole. Lo and behold, it was. This is my Nostradamus moment and has confirmed my suspicions that Microsoft cares almost nothing about the traditional voice services. In fact, we said this in 2022.
We knew this day would come, but we didn’t think it would come this soon. However, it’s not a time for service providers to panic – it’s a time to plan. For the service providers that have relied on Metaswitch to power their voice networks, the next steps will be critical to start the planning process and allocate the right resources and budgets to determine the new path forward for their voice services.
For some CSPs, this news might fit into their strategy to just ride out existing voice services, focus investments on broadband access services, and cede the market to Over-the-Top (OTT) providers. Others may choose to continue with the legacy way of doing things by migrating over to a different legacy voice platform that they can buy and deploy in their own network. However, these strategies aren’t particularly forward-thinking and won’t work for many CSPs. In fact, most of the CSPs we have conversations with are more focused on investing in customer experience, automation and keeping up with innovation. For those CSPs, there is another option: Alianza.
At Alianza, we address the full stack of services to ultimately retire all legacy switching infrastructure in a dynamic, Telco 3.0 cloud model. We support the six key use cases for CSPs (Residential, Analog Business Lines, Specialty Lines, SIP Trunking, Hosted PBX and UCaaS) while maintaining a future-forward perspective of the telco ecosystem. We believe there is value in simplifying telco operations and core communications infrastructure. This means reducing the number of vendors in the solution and automating service management workflows.
The world of telco has changed. And if you’re a Metaswitch operator, this announcement should provide the impetus to start considering where you’re going to serve your customers next. As you begin to migrate your Metaswitch-based services, you’ll need a robust landing zone and safe harbor. Alianza is the best choice. Reach out to our team to learn more about our offerings and get started.
