I’d like to start by wishing all our clients and all our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. It has been a pleasure to serve you this past year… and wow, what a year it has been.
In this final message of 2024 I’d like to share a few reflections on some of the big events that have impacted our work together.
The Metaswitch Hokey Pokey
In case you’ve forgotten, it has been an eventful year for Metaswitch.
- In April, we heard that the MaX UC soft-client would be end-of-life (and basically unusable) after April 30, 2026. This led to significant consternation among service providers who relied on Metaswitch for Hosted PBX and UCaaS functionality, who quickly started looking for third-party soft-clients or entirely new solutions for business communication services.
- That news seemed bad, but in June there were widespread layoffs of the Metaswitch team, and it was clear that Microsoft had basically given up on the product. Hundreds of talented people flooded the marketplace looking for new roles, and the customer base began to seriously worry about the future.
- In December, Alianza announced a plan to purchase the Metaswitch assets along with the remaining team of 300 staff, and (critically) announced that the MaX UC end-of-life would be postponed, removing the most immediate threat for service providers.
A look back for Award Consulting
As you might imagine, all these changes in the industry had a big impact on us as well, although those have not been the only changes for our team.
- This has been a year of growth for Award Consulting. Our client-base has increased by 40%, and we’ve also seen growth in revenue, profit and personnel. On the personnel side we saw our first retirements (thank you Stephen and Rita for your years of service) but we took advantage of the Metaswitch layoffs to onboard some wonderful people to grow our team and strengthen it team for the future.
- We found ourselves undertaking a substantial research project into MaX UC alternatives, and then putting together a direct product support offering for those service providers who wanted to expand their relationship with Award Consulting.
- In addition to our core services, we spent 18% of our time working with our clients on non-Metaswitch projects, including two NetSapiens deployments, several projects configuring TelcoBridges media gateways, and frequent assistance with IP networking for our retainer clients.
What does 2025 have in store?
We are anticipating more growth! We’re continuing to scale our business and our team to support you, and to make sure that we have enough resource to be flexible and responsive when our clients need us. We’re also eager to have more one-on-one conversations with you about your specific needs and the ancillary services we can offer around our core Metaswitch voice expertise.
I’m planning to write a more detailed perspective on the Alianza acquisition in January, but this is how I’m currently thinking about this.
- It will take a long time for anything to change. Alianza is a 350-person company acquiring a team of 300 people. It will be very challenging to merge these teams, and I imagine we’ll see a fairly significant period of stability where the focus is on the status quo. Given the year we’ve just finished, I imagine many service providers will be very content with some stability.
- I’m looking forward to understanding Alianza’s plan for the Metaswitch products and for their existing cloud switching platform – what will they keep, what will they deprecate… will they try to integrate some of these products together, will they sell off parts of the portfolio? And what’s the timeline on all those changes?
- Historically (per these linked articles) Alianza has been all-in on the idea of putting your voice switch in the cloud, and all-in on the idea of software-as-a-service, rather than one-time license purchases. I’m curious to see how that impacts their roadmap for the future of the traditional Metaswitch products, or if they’ll be more flexible around these ideas in the future.
Regardless of what Alianza decides to do, our plan at Award Consulting is pretty simple: focus on serving our clients. That’s our north star in all our decision making. We love working with our clients to help them with their technology.
- If you want to keep using your existing Metaswitch for the next decade, we’ll support your team to make the most of your investment.
- If you want to migrate to a cloud-platform, or a hybrid on-premise and cloud solution, then we’ll happily help you with that migration.
- If you want to keep what you have, and deploy a second platform just for business services, then we can help you configure and launch that product.
We know that all our clients are different. You have different priorities, different values and different goals. – and that’s what makes our work together fun.
As we close out 2024 I want to say again: it has been a pleasure working with you all, and we’re excited to see what 2025 has in store. I hope you and your families all have a fantastic holiday season.
