MetaSwitch eNews - August 2007

Welcome to the fifth edition of eNews! I hope you've had the opportunity to enjoy the summer with plenty of fun in the sun. It's hard to believe we're in the final stretch of the season and preparing to send the kids off to school.

In the spirit of the back-to-school time, this edition of eNews focuses on learning. Discover the four C's of Unified Communications in Jon Arnold's report on one of the hottest topics of the year, learn how MetaSwitch goes beyond just delivering great technology with our recently announced MarketVisions program and find out why a collaboration between experts in softswitching and network operations are being embraced by MSOs.

Unified Communications - Creating New Value for Businesses

By Jon Arnold, Principal, J Arnold & Associates

For businesses of all sizes, Unified Communications is one of the hottest topics in 2007. The term encompasses many things, and represents a solution for a host of challenges facing businesses today. While no universal definition is in place yet, it is easy to understand the appeal of the basic idea. IP - Internet Protocol - may have given us more tools for communicating, but that has also made the process of communicating more complex, and in many ways, less efficient. Unified Communications aims to use IP-based tools to reverse that process and help employees be more productive, as well as give businesses a better return on their technology investment.

Unified Communications is really an evolution from Unified Messaging, and builds on the concept of the single inbox for all messages. This itself was a big step forward, as earlier solutions were discrete - telephone, email, fax, etc. operated in separate silos, with no integration. Unified Messaging solved a lot of communications problems, but Unified Communications takes things even further.

By leveraging the power of SIP and presence, Unified Communications brings richer capabilities for integration across all modes in real time. For example, an IM session can be escalated on the fly into a VoIP call, and from there to a conference call, and even further to a video conference call. All of this can be done seamlessly from the desktop, with the caller simply using click-to-call from their directory every step of the way.

So what does this mean for businesses, and more specifically, the types of businesses that are typically served by MetaSwitch's customers?

MetaSwitch Introduces MarketVisions

As a subscriber to MetaSwitch eNews, hopefully you already know that MetaSwitch has built up a reputation second to none for delivering great products and backing them up with superb customer support. But did you know that MetaSwitch's commitment to supporting its customers goes well beyond "just" delivering great technology?

MetaSwitch's recently announced MarketVisions program is designed to provide service providers with the tools required to successfully identify market opportunities, position their offerings, and profitably target, sell and support their end-user customers.

What is an SDP?

By Daniel Marcus, Marketing Director, MetaSwitch

At the recent NXTComm show in Chicago, MetaSwitch launched a service delivery platform (SDP) product as part of its ground-breaking MetaSphere applications suite. For many readers, this probably leads to the question "so what is an SDP anyway?"

New Opportunities for Success in the Education Market

E-Rate and Funding for Hosted VoIP Services

By Chris Carabello, Marketing Director, MetaSwitch

The Education market holds tremendous promise for service providers. According to a recent study from Instat^*, telecommunications revenues from the K-12 U.S. education market stood at nearly $4.8 billion in 2006 and is estimated to reach nearly $6 billion by 2010. On an individual customer level, this translates to approximately $40,000 per customer annually.

Education managers are expected to increasingly demand more bandwidth and adopt services such as IP VPN, Ethernet technologies, and VoIP, in an effort to improve student achievement, improve teachers' productivity, and for allowing additional services to be provided over a greater area, such as in distance learning applications.

In addition, as school districts consolidate their networks, hosted IP telephony services are expected to experience tremendous gains in the K-12 segment. Based on recent changes to the E-Rate program, these services are now eligible to be discounted for your school and library customers.

The application process for the 2008/2009 E-Rate funding year began this July, with late January as the historical deadline for schools and libraries to complete all paperwork and identify their service provider. Now is therefore the right time to take action so that you too can benefit.

Outsourced VoIP Solution for Cable Operators

Collaboration between experts in softswitching and network operations embraced by MSOs

With Cable Voice over IP (VoIP) showing dramatic growth, especially in the business services market, MetaSwitch and Big River Telephone Company have joined to enable a significant source of new revenue for cable system operators.

Using Big River's MetaSwitch-powered wholesale VoIP service, regional cable systems operators can simultaneously achieve several ambitious goals:

Seven cable providers have already adopted the combined Big River / MetaSwitch VoIP solution, including Eagle Communications, NewWave Communications and Vista III Media. Big River anticipates signing up additional cable partners throughout the United States based on the success of these initial deployments.

Increasing the Spotlight

Recent participation in cable industry events allow MetaSwitch to broaden focus

In recent months MetaSwitch has participated in three major cable shows in order to expand our offering in the cable market and get to know our existing cable customers better. Event highlights include:

SCTE Cable-Tech Expo
Orlando, FL

MetaSwitch made a splash with considerable presence and remarkable results at the SCTE Cable-Tech Expo. For first-time exhibitors we had significant booth traffic and enjoyed meeting new people in the territory. A big thank you to our partner Integra5 with who we were able to demonstrate our suite of business services in collaboration with their residential caller ID pop up.

The Independent Show hosted by NCTC and ACA
Monterey, CA

The NCTC/ACA Independent Show proved to be a smash hit! MetaSwitch collaborated with Cisco to showcase our joint COMPETE! solution for cable operators and generated a buzz of interest. With both companies in the same booth, we did all we could to keep up with inquiries and greet new and existing customers. Thank you NCTC for putting on such a great show!

CableLabs Summer Conference
Keystone, CO

At the CableLabs Summer Conference MetaSwitch demonstrated our rich set of SIP telephony services for business customers. In addition to our many phone-based applications we showcased our web portal, visual voicemail, Find Me Follow Me and much more. For more information about seeing one of our demonstrations for yourself please contact our northern California sales office at (510) 748 8230.

Thank you to all who visited MetaSwitch at these tradeshows and we hope to see you all again in the near future!

And Finally...

According to a recent satisfaction survey, 20% of households that do not already purchase service bundles say they plan to in the next year. Of that number, 54% would prefer a telecom service bundle and 44% would prefer a cable service bundle. Source: Cloes Fornell International Group.