Metaswitch is supporting TADHack as a technology partner. They are a critical technology behind several of the sponsors. Metaswitch is leading the change in communication networks to a cloud-based, software-centric future. They develop openly programmable communication software that runs on standard hardware or in virtualized environments.

Metaswitch’s Project Clearwater is an open-source IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) designed for the cloud and available to the worldwide community of software developers and systems integrators. Project Clearwater is used by several of the TADHack sponsors, including Tropo to power their platform. Tropo will be running the development theme “Hack Your calls”, where developers can add services within an ongoing call e.g. using voice control to add people to a call; and route / reroute calls across your many devices with a simple swipe, word or gesture.  This will be a world-first.

Clearwater is also Juju charmed.  Juju from Ubuntu can instantly deploy, integrate and scale Clearwater and Tropo on any public cloud, private cloud or bare-metal equipment. Juju charms were explained by Maarten Ectors at the TADSummit last year.  The developer spotlight on Thomas Howe captured the importance of web development to telecom apps, and Juju takes this to the next level in telecom apps software can instantly deploy, integrate and scale.

Traditional IMS is expensive and exceedingly vendor-centric. Project Clearwater solves this problem by open sourcing IMS; delivering call and session control functions, along with Telephony Application Server (TAS) capabilities, within any virtualized data center. Clearwater offers massive scale and “telco-grade” reliability in private or public Cloud environments, together with exceptionally low running costs of around 2 cents per subscriber per year based on Amazon AWS pricing. Metaswitch provides operators and developers with the tools to create highly-scaled VoIP and VoLTE networks and advanced Web-scale communications applications.

And Tropo makes it easy for developers to access the rich capabilities of Project Clearwater to create new and exciting communication services. This will be a world-first for developers to “Hack their Calls”, we’ll have lots more information on how to access these resources for the hackathon in the coming months, its going to be fun.