I would not place any bets on there being a holistic end state worldview
attached to this acquisition vs it just being a metabolic process.
Microsoft had a hole in their Teams / SFB product. The telco side sucked.
They thought they could buy a telco vendor and fill that hole. The
driving exec team would get to place a feather in their caps and claim
they drew the proverbial sword from the stone and should each be granted
their own kingdoms.
The Metaswitch ownership got to take delivery of gold plated dumptrucks
full of cash.
Once the ink was dry a culture war ensued. Metaswitch wanted to continue
sucking in their own entirely British/telco way where the end user
carrier should not be permitted to do almost anything. Microsoft
insisted they begin sucking in entirely new cloud/azurian ways. In
response nearly all meta employees have exited, so there's now a
disenfranchised customer base of orphaned carriers and no supporting
brainpower, meanwhile all customers have felt the sword of Damocles over
them the whole time never sure if their business would have a path
forward. Many have already made other plans for product continuity by
switching to other vendors or outsourcing their tech entirely.
The purges I believe concluded last year with most of the original meta
team members being released save for a very select few who were offered
roles inside the teams / azure org.
I think this sale is Microsoft selling the proverbial owl-pellet of what
remains of its Metaswitch acquisition. I'm not sure what actual value
Microsoft actually derived from this exercise but I am sure this move
represents the final step of digestion where some loss/depreciation is
written off in FY24
-Ryan
On 12/11/2024 9:51 AM, Alex Balashov via VoiceOps wrote:
On Dec 11, 2024, at 12:46 pm, Enzo Damato via VoiceOps <[email protected]>
wrote:
I think Microsoft's big goal with this was to acquire a working, reliable SIP
and IMS stack. I would put money on the metaswtich technology being a big part
of what's running teams and their other VoIP platforms in the backed. Now that
they've presumably merged that tech into their stack, they have no interest in
continuing to service the ILEC/CLEC market.
You might be right. But if they had just licensed this from a major softswitch
vendor like Metaswitch, or got the professional services / consulting arm of
Metaswitch (or whoever) to do the integration for them, they might have spent a
lot less than $270MM and without any of the drama.
-- Alex
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