Edgewater and Metaswitch announcee the availability of a joint offering aimed at service providers delivering VoIP services to enterprises. The solution combines Edgewater’s VoIP monitoring and installation solution, EdgeView, with Metaswitch’s MetaView solution. It enables service providers to easily provision and support enterprise environments where a heterogeneous mix of IP phone devices from different manufacturers are in use. These environments are costly to install and maintain as there is no standard interface across all of the manufacturers that can be used to automate provisioning or perform advanced diagnostics. The two products, EdgeView and MetaView, deliver simplified, scalable provisioning and enhanced visibility into the performance of today’s VoIP networks.

The combined solution provides the following benefits:

• Plug & play IP phone installation: Edgewater’s EdgeView solution complements Metaswitch’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) solution by enabling the deployment of SIP-based IP phones from a wide variety of phone vendors such as Cisco, LG, and Polycom. The solution eases installation by allowing the end-user to simply plug a phone into a network powered by Edgewater’s EdgeMarc ESBCs and then follow a series of intuitive voice prompts. EdgeView then authenticates the user via Metaswitch’s Multimedia Telephony Application Server and automatically updates the phone’s software and the subscriber’s phone configuration. The customer is instantly on-line and ready to make calls.
• Improved out-of-box experience for end-users: The combined solution uses a series of easy to follow voice prompts that provide a substantial improvement over alternative methods of configuration.
• Seamless product integration using advanced APIs: The joint solution uses an authenticated API to hide systems complexity from network operators.
• Easy to add new phones: As new IP phone models are approved for the VoIP service, network operators use a template driven interface to provision qualifying phones.
• Real-time on-premise diagnostics: By deploying the joint management solution with Edgewater ESBCs at the customer premise, the service provider has remote access to a wealth of VoIP call quality performance statistics. These can be used to quickly identify and resolve problems the customer may encounter with their hosted VoIP service.

With today’s announcement Metaswitch becomes a member of Edgewater’s Plug & Dial Alliance program that enables service providers to significantly shorten hosted VoIP installation times and simplify ongoing moves, adds and changes. In addition to offering interoperability between, and automated setup of, many leading brands of SIP-based IP phones, the Edgewater Plug & Dial Alliance program continuously tests new devices and adds them to the program.