Thanks to everyone who attended our webinar, “The Restaurant at the end of Metaswitch” last week. We ended up with 300 live attendees and 30 minutes of questions, plus the headline article on Light Reading the next day.
I don’t want to recap the whole webinar in this article, but as I’ve been reflecting on recent events, I do want to share a few thoughts for those of you impacted by this situation – as we all try to figure out (in the words of Jed Bartlett), “what’s next?”
What will Microsoft do?
Microsoft still wants telcos to use Azure for their cloud operations, but doesn’t want to be directly involved in providing the applications that will run on that cloud.
- As an existing customer you can still buy products to expand your network, but they don’t want any new sales of the products.
- They have committed to fulfill their legal obligations in terms of existing contracts, and will be announcing end-of-life dates in accordance with their existing EOL policies. My hope is that this means the 2030 EOL date for the ATCA hardware is honored for everything, but that’s just a guess.
- There is still a support team, and a very much smaller engineering team – and my assumption is that the engineering team will be focused on bug fixes and security enhancements, but no new features.
- As I speculated in the webinar, if Microsoft wants to move on from Metaswitch, it would make a lot of sense for them to sell off the assets and the support obligations to a third-party. If something like that happens then maybe there’s no EOL after all, and maybe even there might be some development of the product – depending on who purchases it and for what purpose.
What should you do?
As I said repeatedly in the webinar: Don’t Panic! 🙂
- Your Metaswitch products still work. The Metaswitch is a well-rounded, stable, mature platform that does an excellent job as a class 5 switch, and still offers a good UCaaS product (although the lack of roadmap is obviously a concern on the UCaaS side).
- We’re making very good progress on possible replacements for MaX UC, so you can still offer a good hosted PBX product in the short-term. We’ll have some announcements about that in the coming months.
- If you are operating the Metaswitch primarily for hosted PBX / UCaaS then I think it’s reasonable to start thinking about the future, but you have some time. We’re working on some partnerships with vendors that might be a good fit in this space – again watch this space for more info in the coming months.
- If you’re using the Metaswitch primarily as a class 5 switch then there genuinely is no hurry. I personally don’t think there’s a better product out there today.
- In the long-term, maybe someone will acquire the Metaswitch assets and continue to develop the platform. Or you could move your voice platform to the cloud (as we’ve discussed previously). Moving to the cloud is probably where we’ll all end up eventually, but I don’t think you win any prizes for being an early adopter of cloud voice platforms. By taking your time you allow other people to iron out all the bugs!
Having said all that, I know this is a difficult time for everyone using Metaswitch products. We are committed to growing our team and building our services so that we can support our core client base (smaller ILECs and CLECs in North America) in the future.
- For those who need high-touch, personal, hands-on support for your Metaswitch platform – that’s what we’ve always done.
- For those who need help with projects / professional services – it may take a bit more time to figure out the details, but we absolutely plan to support you in these projects.
- For those of you who want to move to other platforms, we have strong relationships with the relevant vendors, and will be able to help you with those migrations and provide support once you get to the other side.
A quick note for Tier 1/2 and international operators: I recognize that the changes at Microsoft impact you just as much as our core base of smaller North-American service providers. We have been working with our existing client-base for 8 years and we need to prioritize supporting those clients in the immediate future. That doesn’t mean we’ll never be able to help you out, or that we can’t help you in small ways – but our focus needs to be on our existing clients, to honor those who helped us build our business for the past 8 years.
If you attended the webinar and completed the survey expressing your future needs we have begun the process of reaching out to you. We’re starting with the support requests, and we’ll move on to Professional Services in July/August. If you have a pressing need please fill out our online contact form and we’ll reach out to you as soon as we can.
