What on earth is MaX, and should I care?

So the PR was successful, but in among all the marketing and positioning, I’ve been trying to answer one question: What exactly is MaX, and should I care?

​My goal is to keep this concise and quick to read, and of course I’m coming at this in part from a technical perspective.

Lots of people use their cell phones for both personal and business purposes these days. This creates a couple of key challenges.​

• How do you separate business calls (incoming and outgoing) from personal calls?
• How can you collaborate with your co-workers (IM, conference calls, etc) using your cell phone?​

There are plenty of over-the-top apps that attempt to solve these problems, but these apps all suffer from the fact that they need to use the data network for calls and communication – and it would be a much better user experience (and have much better call quality) to use the native dialer on the phone and the voice network for these calls.

If you’re a wireline carrier then I don’t see that this has any relevance to you (although see the last section of this article for a couple of related thoughts).

The software running in the core network seems to be doing a few different things, including:

• Incoming Call Manager-style routing control (to allow MLHGs etc)
• Standard and multi-party call set up as a result of requests from the app
• Modifying the outbound caller ID (based on contact lists in the app AND network intelligence based on previous call history) to automatically present outbound calls as being from a user’s business number or personal number. The call history piece is cool – if a number has previously called a subscriber on their business number, then any outbound calls to that same party will use the business caller ID.
• I suspect there’s also some similar magic going on with SMS messages which ultimately end up within the MaX business collaboration app.

• SimRing / Find-me-Follow-me features are designed to allow a user to tie their cell phone to their business phone, and be accessible on both.
• Accession Mobile (and similar voice apps) allow calls to business lines to be received on cell phones, and outbound calls to be placed from the business number. Accession also has some integration with the actual cell number – e.g. where you can have the switch call out to your cell phone first before setting up the call – to allow calls to be placed over the cell network while using the business caller ID. However the user experience is more complex than would be possible using the native dialer and MaX.
• Accession Mobile offers instant messaging between lines within a business group, and indeed to other SMS numbers if you integrate Accession Messaging Service (AMS) with an SMS gateway. However this is pretty limited compared to the full collaboration app that MaX seems to be offering.

Hopefully this short primer is helpful. I would love to hear from any Metaswitch folks in the comments to correct / expand on any of the assumptions I’ve made about how it all works.