Microsoft doubles down on the telco cloud with Metaswitch acquisition

Don’t say you weren’t warned, telecoms industry. The tech big guns are trained on your home turf and they’re not afraid to splash the cash.

Less than two months ago Microsoft bought into NFV by acquiring Affirmed Networks. Now it has doubled-down on that investment with the acquisition of Metaswitch Networks, which is also all about the virtual network, for an undisclosed sum.

“This announcement builds on our recent acquisition of Affirmed Networks, which closed on April 23, 2020,” explained the Microsoft blog on the matter. “Metaswitch’s complementary portfolio of ultra-high-performance, cloud-native communications software will expand our range of offerings available for the telecommunications industry. Microsoft intends to leverage the talent and technology of these two organizations, extending the Azure platform to both deploy and grow these capabilities at scale in a way that is secure, efficient and creates a sustainable ecosystem.

“As the industry moves to 5G, operators will have opportunities to advance the virtualization of their core networks and move forward on a path to an increasingly cloud-native future. Microsoft will continue to meet customers where they are, working together with the industry as operators and network equipment providers evolve their own operations.”

So it seems clear that Microsoft is pretty serious about the telco cloud. It already has some of the best cloud infrastructure in the world and it’s rapidly adding the software required to make it telecoms-friendly. Metaswitch is small, so this seems to be as much about talent as products. Either way Microsoft is rapidly building a telco cloud capability that specialist vendors can only dream about.