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Traditionally known for its Class 5 softswitch, Metaswitch Networks has had a wide range of IP Communications applications available for operators. As the company continues to expand its portfolio into areas such as SBCs and soft clients, it took the opportunity to highlight some of the more interesting projects built around its software at Metaswitch Forum week's last week in Las Vegas.

AT&T (News - Alert) is a long-standing customer with Metaswitch, with a relationship dating back over a decade since AT&T's IP unified messaging platform is built around a core of Metaswitch products. Laurier "Chicky" Leclair, product development engineer for AT&T, says the current iteration of its solution supports two million subscribers per platform, supporting voice mail, email, and fax to the same in-box.

For AT&T, the unified messaging product is a long-term project providing savings on a variety of fronts. The carrier has accumulated a large number of different and proprietary-based messaging platforms over the years between mergers and new business starts. It is now in the process of consolidating on Linux-based servers as it retires older systems that have reached end-of-life. More powerful COTS hardware enables the reduction of servers for savings in power and real estate, as well as lower operational costs on maintenance.

While usage isn't mandatory, Leclair expects more AT&T business divisions to migrate onto the platform in the future as legacy systems are retired and those divisions work through the business cases for replacements.

A totally different and new approach to hospitality phone services was introduced by Blue Mountain Networks.   The company has announced M-Suites, a hospitality middleware products to enable service providers to deliver cloud-based phone service on a pay-as-you-go approach. 

Major hospitality brands have been saddled with dedicated PBX (News - Alert) gear to provide phone services to guest rooms. Many of these systems are now at or past end-of-life and now need replacement.   A "classic" cloud approach for the hospitality business doesn't really work because billing/usage needs to be linked to the guest reservation system.

As a hosted service linked into the existing reservation management system, M-Suites offers phone service effectively charged on a per room basis per day. If there's nobody in the room, there's no need to charge for phone service on that day, so the expense of providing phone calls for guests becomes much more of an operational expense rather than a sunk-cost capital expense with a dedicated PBX solution.

Blue Mountain provides some gear at the customer site for routing and E-911 fallover provisioning, but it's a much smaller footprint. The hotel operating company also gets operational expense savings because it doesn't have to carry a annual insurance policy on all of its PBX hardware -- because there is no on-site PBX. Celeste Jones, CMO of Blue Mountain, said one 10 property hospitality firm ended up seeing their million dollar PBX insurance policy decrease by 90 percent by moving to a cloud solution.