Andy Abramson and Rich Tehrani have takes on this — so does every analyst. I look at it different.
Metaswitch in the US is in every telco. This gives Microsoft an in into every telco customer of Metaswitch. MS Teams/Skype direct routing for all. Teams can now become the default app for collab and calling in businesses globally – if it is played right.
Metaswitch has their own SBC. That helps MS in its age old one-upmanship with Oracle that acquired Acme Packet and Tekelec 8 years ago.
5G? I don’t know much about Meta’s 5G product. I know that Sprint, AT&T and VZ have Metaswitch but none of them use Meta’s MAX mobile UC. I don’t think that changes any due to MS’s mobile history (read: failure).
I know Cisco is a factor in this too. Webex Teams powered by Broadsoft. Let’s not forget that this is reiteration number 4 or 5 for Webex/Jabber/BSFT/Spark/whathaveyou. Cisco ain’t so great on this front either. If anyone should have leapfrogged the market with a great UX designed app, it should have been Cisco.
I also can’t believe that Webex – like every other conferencing app – has the same login process. Nothing original in this aspect of the space at all. Hello?
This announcement came out of the Azure group, so this is about cloud, NFV and SDN. However, a majority of Meta’s clients are mom and pop telcos in rural America who cannot/will not go virtual.
I think this is more like the LinkedIn buy for Microsoft. One department that had the cash decided that they needed this thing that Metaswitch had – oh and btw there are other nice to haves available.

As I wrote on twitter, MS has a history of buying stuff like LinkedIn and Skype – and not being able to extract value from it. They don’t embrace it and enhance it and put it back out in the world better than when they bought it.
Instead it ends up like Internet Explorer or Bing – a check box that we have it, but no one is using it. Much like their mobile play.
I could be wrong but I am hoping this isn’t the big blue screen of death for Metaswitch as a switch. There aren’t any replacements out there.