User:Me and/Metaswitch

Metaswitch Networks Ltd (commonly Metaswitch) is a private UK-based company that produces network software for communication service providers, equipment manufacturers and large enterprises.

Corporate history
Metaswitch (formerly Data Connection Ltd) was founded in 1981 by seven former IBM employees led by Ian Ferguson, who remains on the board of directors.

In 2000, the Data Connection launched the "MetaSwitch" brand for marketing to telephone service providers. In October 2009, to reflect the growing focus on the products sold under that brand, the company began marketing itself as Metaswitch Networks (with a lower case "s"), formally changing the company name in August 2011.

Customers
Metaswitch claims more than 1,000 network operator and network equipment manufacturer customers, including Tier 1 service providers, cable operators, and independent operating companies (IOCs). Notable customers include AT&T, British Telecom (BT), Cable & Wireless Worldwide, Charter Communications, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, EarthLink, FairPoint, Frontier, Inmarsat, Mediacom, Sprint Nextel, TDS, Telefónica, Telekom Austria Group, Tiscali and Windstream.

Locations
Metaswitch's head office is in London, UK. It also has main offices in the USA, Australia, Mexico, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as regional offices worldwide.

Acquisitions
In March 2010, the firm acquired AppTrigger Inc, a provider of Service Broker solutions in Richardson, TX. In April 2011, it acquired Colibria AS, a provider of Rich Communication Suite (RCS) software in Oslo, Norway.

Ownership and investors
Metaswitch is a private limited company. Since 1987, shares in the company have been held by an employee benefit trust ("the EBT"), which enabled company-wide profit sharing.

In January 2008 Francisco Partners, a private equity firm, and Sequoia Capital, a venture capitalist firm, invested an undisclosed sum in Metaswitch.

Products
Metaswitch designs, sells and supports IP multimedia communications software for network operators of all sizes and types. Its products include session border controllers, telephony application servers, media gateways, desktop and mobile unified communications (UC) software clients and tools to help operators manage and analyze their networks.

Voice and VoIP applications
Metaswitch provides a range of telephony application server and switching products for service providers who are building voice networks using IP, modernizing legacy voice networks or deploying new voice applications.


 * The MetaSphere MTAS platform provides voice and video applications, including unified messaging and dynamic call control.


 * The Universal Media Gateway supports TDM media over legacy access and trunk network connections.


 * The Integrated Softswitch supports media and call control functions. It is intended for service providers who want to replace their telephony switches or provide VoIP services.


 * The MetaSphere Media Resource Server provides support for recorded announcements and other media functions in VoIP networks.

SIP infrastructure
Metaswitch’s SIP infrastructure components are designed to enable telephone service providers to migrate to IP networks.


 * Perimeta is a highly-scalable session border controller (SBC) with distributed signaling and media functions.


 * Its SIP Session Router provides SIP management features that are designed to make core SIP routing simpler and more resilient.

4th generation communications
The firm's 4G communications products are designed to enable end users to control their communications services across multiple devices.


 * The CommPortal suite of cross-platform user interfaces allows residential and enterprise customers to access communications services on PCs, TVs and mobile handsets. CommPortal includes web portals, widgets, desktop and mobile applications, and a softphone.

Past products

 * The Colibria product suite enables mobile service providers to deploy a standards-compliant Rich Communications Suite (RCS) or RCS-e infrastructure.


 * Thrutu, launched in March 2011, is a cloud based smartphone application that allows users to share media, location and other information during a regular phone conversation.    Thrutu is available on Android, iOS and BlackBerry. Thrutu was named Android App of the Week on Reg Hardware and was included in a list of the week’s best Android apps on Gizmodo.

Management systems
The firm's Network Management System provides integrated provisioning, operations and troubleshooting capabilities that work with all Metaswitch products.


 * MetaView Web is a web-based interface for subscriber management.


 * MetaView Explorer is a Java-based client application for subscriber and network management.


 * MetaView Service Assurance Server is a diagnostics platform that helps service provider technicians to diagnose configuration, network and interoperability problems.


 * MetaView Voice Quality Monitoring is a network-based system for monitoring the quality of calls in a VoIP network, to enable service providers to diagnose quality issues and remedy them.


 * MetaView SIP Provisioning Server is a centralized platform for deploying, registering and configuring SIP phones in a service provider network.

Software Defined Networking
Metaswitch develops and licenses portable protocol stacks for system manufacturers of VoIP, IP Routing, MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS), Generalized MPLS (GMPLS), IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and Systems Network Architecture (SNA) equipment. This extensive background in networking protocols has helped the company develop software-defined networking solutions for network operators and enterprises running large data centers. In 2014, Metaswitch introduced Project Calico to the open source community. Project Calico helps data center operators overcome the current virtual network limitations that prevent data centers from scaling up to and beyond thousands of servers running millions of virtual machines.