by Chris Burgy, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Ooma 

Microsoft sometimes reminds me of Bruce the Shark from “Finding Nemo,” the character who keeps repeating “Fish are friends, not food” before getting a whiff of blood and going into a wild feeding frenzy.

Seriously, I believe Microsoft wants to have good relationships with its partners – including telecom providers – and often goes the extra mile to help them. But sometimes a bigger agenda at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, gets in the way.

Case in point: Microsoft’s recent decision to declare end-of-life for the MaX UC client from Metaswitch, followed by layoffs that wiped out most of the team supporting the Metaswitch platform.

Microsoft’s recommendation to the carriers who have embedded Metaswitch in their UC stack: Move your customers to Microsoft Teams. That’s clearly good for Microsoft, but not necessarily welcome news for the carriers who have suddenly shifted in Microsoft’s eyes from friends to food.

If a carrier shifts from selling its own branded UC solution to Teams, customers could logically assume they’re doing business with Microsoft and no longer see any value in their carrier relationship. Carriers also lose control over their future with Microsoft free to change pricing, features and licensing terms over time.

The best survival strategy for carriers, clearly, is to move away from Metaswitch as soon as possible, although I readily admit that’s much easier said than done.

What, then, is the best alternative to Metaswitch?

No surprise, I present 2600Hz for your consideration.

2600Hz, an Ooma company, offers a truly white-label UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS stack through the Kazoo platform. There are no restrictions on carriers putting their own branding on 2600Hz offerings and they are free to modify or add to the platform through an extensive set of APIs allowing for significant differentiation via the carrier’s own intellectual property.

Additionally, the 2600hz Kazoo platform offers a lot of flexibility in hosting, with options including shared hosting, exclusive hosting in the carrier’s datacenters or in a public cloud of choice. This lets the carrier decide how to optimize performance and reduce latency for critical applications such as artificial intelligence and large language models.

Have I put enough bait on the hook? Give us a call at 415-886-7900 and let’s talk about making sure your UC business is a predator and not prey.