By Richard Martin

Boosting its market share in a tough economy, softswitch provider MetaSwitch in 2009 has moved beyond its tradition focus on Tier 2 and below service providers in the U.S., targeting larger carriers as it broadens its offerings and opens its platforms to third-party developers.

An exhibitor at the VON Conference & Expo, MetaSwitch is among a handful of “smaller market players with limited exposure to large network upgrade projects” that have gained market share in 2009, according to a recent report from Dell`Oro Group. The overall carrier IP telephony market rose 7 percent sequentially in the second quarter, to $737 million, the report found, and “business voice-over-broadband licenses on both softswitches and voice application servers remain a bright spot," said Greg Collins, vice president at Dell`Oro Group.

Having become one of the leading vendors of software-based networking systems in the last few years, with a 44 percent market share in Class 5 softswitch replacements, MetaSwitch is increasingly focused on a converged world of highly customizable communications applications running on multiple devices. The company will invest $35 million in R&D in 2009, CEO John Lazar told the crowd at the MetaSwitch Forum in Las Vegas earlier this year, much of it focused on new applications, widgets, and Web 2.0 services to enable service provider customers to deliver new functions and generate new revenue streams.

Following the trend toward openness that is sweeping the telecom industry, MetaSwitch has created an online open-source community to foster the development of third-party applications for the company’s line of softswitches and applications suites. Called the “MetaSwitch Innovators Community,” the online portal features discussion forums, a testbed, blogs, API support and documentation, and sample code.

Putting its code where its policy is, MetaSwitch also said it is releasing its set of communications widgets, released as part of the version 7.0 of MetaSwitch’s product suite this week at the company customer and partner forum in Las Vegas, under an open source license. Called “CommPortal Widgets,” the applets allow service providers to embed commonly used communications features, like voice mail and message lists, directly into Web interfaces and desktops.

“We see the Innovator Community as not just a third-party developer community,” Lazar told reporters, “but as a true business social network” that will allow developers, partners, and MetaSwitch engineers to collaborate on new services and new applications.

Previewing an era of fully converged communications on multiple devices, MetaSwitch has also debuted a series of new voice applications. Speaking to an audience largely made up of independent service providers and CLECs at the Las Vegas conference, CTO Chris Mairs advised them “to start thinking more about service delivery and applications services as a separate business from the pipes they provide.”

To that end, Mairs showed off a series of new applications in MetaSwitch’s MetaSphere suite that unite multiple devices to provide functions like unified message stores and voice-to-text voice mail displays.

In one application, users can immediately access voice mail from a widget on their personalized iGoogle homepage, listening to the message via one click on their PC.

“The most compelling solutions are created if the widgets have access to network based services,” explained Mairs, “that allow developers to create experiences that span multiple devices.”