Aug 30, 2007 5:21 PM,

MetaSwitch feeling its oats with 500th deployment

By Tim McElligott

MetaSwitch took stock of its success this week by putting nice round numbers on some key metrics. Its softswitch and media gateway systems topped the list, having exceeded 500 deployments.

The platforms MetaSwitch now has in-field have been deployed by over 250 service providers worldwide. The company now serves subscribers and has gear running in all 50 states. It also has deployments in Asia, Europe, Canada and Latin America,.

“It’s an interesting maturing of the business, which we are obviously pleased with,” said John Lazar, CEO of MetaSwitch. “An obvious manifestation of that is that we are getting a lot of repeat business now. Our customers’ growth is obviously helping us as well.”

MetaSwitch’s mainstay customers are still the rural independent operating companies and the CLECs, but it also now serves nine of the top 50 U.S. ILECs, including large independents such as CenturyTel and Windstream.

“We have been careful about our growth; we didn’t want to blow ourselves apart,” Lazar said. “I now feel confident that we have the capacity to take new opportunities in a more systematic way. I think you have to make sure you have the organizational capacity to take it on.”

In addition to expanding its customer portfolio, MetaSwitch also has expanded its product portfolio. In June, the company introduced its MetaSphere service delivery platform (SDP) along with a suite of applications. The SDP is pre-integrated with MetaSwitch’s session controller, PSTN emulation server and media gateway. It supports unified messaging, an incoming call manager and a desktop communications manager.

To reach its current milestones, MetaSwitch had to grow the number of systems shipped by 23% each quarter over the last three years. The company shipped over 400,000 media gateway ports each quarter in the last year.