CTIA: Metaswitch tries new tack with Thrutu mobile app play

ORLANDO -- With its first-ever CTIA booth (following its first appearance at Mobile World Congress just weeks before), Metaswitch appears game to tackle the wireless market. Its approach: lead with its SIP Session Router (from its AppTrigger acquisition) and deep IP/VoIP expertise, but once in the door quickly turn the conversation to helping operators deliver mobile apps to compete with app stores and over-the-top rivals.

The SIP play targets the need for mobile operators to better manage the flood of IP sessions flooding their networks. The mobile app conversation hits at a more strategic level, helping operators fend off “OTTrition,” or the loss of customer attention to over-the-top content and app rivals, said Steve Gleave, Metaswitch vice president of marketing, in an interview here.

On the mobile apps front, Metaswitch was showing two things of note: one, a mobile unified communications suite (built with partner CounterPath) that aims to blur whether a user receives calls or sends text on their hardline, mobile phone or soft client; and two, Thrutu, an Android market-available mobile app that adds new content sharing options to mobile calls.

Metaswitch has been trying to improve the VoIP call experience for some time; now it’s simply “taken all of that and extended it to the mobile phone,” said Gleave.

Thrutu in particular represents a strong attempt to change the apps game for operators. All VoIP app server vendors have rolled out APIs and developer programs (Metaswitch included) to admittedly mixed success. With Thrutu, Metaswitch aims to leverage the latest mobile app tricks (building for Android, deploying via the standard Android Market app store, etc) while trying to deepen that experience for users by better leveraging the operator network, Gleave said.

At its core, Thrutu lets users share content during a mobile call. When a call is established between two Thrutu-enabled phones, the app launches via a transparent “drawer” that opens up, overlaying the phones standard call screen. Inside the drawer are icons that let users interact during the call by, for example, sharing location data, contact info, photos and more.

The app is focused on “extending the voice call,” which is also a goal of the industry’s Rich Communications Suite (RCS) effort. While that project has tons of potential (including the ability to add operator interoperability to mobile apps), it has been slow to move compared with mobile app efforts by Google, Apple and others, Gleave admitted. An “RCS-lite” version is in the offing to address those concerns, while Metaswitch’s UC and Thrutu efforts represent an “RCS-like” experience, he said.

Thrutu is Metaswitch’s first attempt – with more coming perhaps depending on how Thrutu is received by both users and operators – to both demonstrate the potential of operator-delivered mobile apps and “help take the pain” out of the process for operators. Gleave said the company is having conversations with multiple carriers about both its mobile UC and Thrutu apps with more news on that front to come soon.