As widely reported today in press releases,
Metaswitch Networks today signaled its ambition to become a major telecommunications vendor, with the appointment of successful industry executive Kevin DeNuccio as chief executive officer. At the same time, John Lazar has been promoted to chairman.
On the conference call discussing the move, DeNuccio focused on some key points.
1. Product Line Expansion. Metaswitch wants to expand their current product line, primarily using their existing engineering base. Metaswitch has strong software-based telecom and network-protocol support, but you don't see see them doing a lot of hardware design with FPGAs or CAMs with their current development staff. Their DSPs, for example, are products from Texas Instruments. Products like the Acme Packet SBC or Cisco Routers have sophisticated fast path hardware.
So I think we can look for more software-based system-control products, and probably not as many line-rate products like routers, switches. Could Metaswitch make a competent firewall? Absolutely. Could they make a great Call-Quality Enhancer? Yep. Could they make an SBC? They'd actually have a lot of work.
Could they create a some real competition in the Application Server / Registrar world? Certainly. Since the demise of Sylantro and Tekelec's feature servers, and the inability to launch Sonus's feature server in a significant way. Right now, Metaswitch's product is tightly integrated to their TDM gateway. Some customers (ITSPs) don't actually want an SS7-capable gateway, and don't need T1 voice interfaces.
2. Purchase of new companies. DeNuccio mentioned purchasing other companies several times. You haven't seen many publicly-announced mergers out of Metaswitch in the past; they've built their own tools, but they sometimes do integrate with others' products. I wonder if we'll hear a merger announcement soon.
3. Global expansion. Metaswitch is very strong with switches in North America. Just based on the technology, I'd expect the fastest growth in the Caribbean (who share most of the US's telecom technology), and Japan (ditto). I suspect, but don't know, that the British Commonwealth nations might be good targets next, because engineers tend to know about the technologies in use nearby, and many of Metaswitch's developers are in London. I suspect many commonwealth nations use the UK telecom standards and C7 variant.
