MetaSwitch (www.metaswitch.com) started off the week with venture funding and a customer announcement. It will follow today with a pair of product announcements.

Francisco Partners and Sequoia Capital have put in a “significant” but undisclosed investment round into Data Connections Limited (DCL), MetaSwitch’s parent. On its own, DCL has generated more than $100 million in annual revenue and has an “exceptional track record of profitability” according to one of the senior partners at Francisco.

DCL’s entire existing management team will stay in place and the Data Connection Employee Benefit Trust (EBT), previously the sole shareholder in the business, retains a major stake in the company.

IT&E, a leading Pacific islands carrier servicing Guam, is MetaSwitch’s newest announced customer. IT&E is providing competitive residential phone service sold through the island’s cable operator, MCV Broadband and currently counts more than 1,000 customers installed. The carrier is 28 years old and initially deployed MetaSwitch technology to build on its history as a provider of long distance, PCS wireless and internet services to an existing customer base, including the tourist industry.

New products being announced today include a management system with network diagnostic capabilities and a new client application for the desktop. The MetaView Management System provides fault management across multiple network elements, including MetaSwitch and MetaSphere SDP (service delivery platform) and applications servers, and select third-party equipment. It also includes a new call diagnostics capability to supplement MetaSwitch’s management systems, a SOAP/XML provisioning model to enable easy automation and integration into third party management systems, and the collation of real-time IP voice quality statistics from the media gateway and other VoIP equipment to produce a graphical display of network-wide voice quality.

“Our customers wanted and needed the visibility of voice quality in the network, but didn’t want to make the investment of additional hardware,” said Martin Taylor, Vice President of Product Management and Technology Strategy. “The main concern is the additional cost and complexity [of more hardware] is majorly off-putting for customers. They want to leverage their existing capabilities. Why should they have to spend additional money on hardware?”

The MetaSwitch CommAssistant works in tandem with the company’s existing CommPortal application and the MetaSphere SDP to deliver an easy-to-use desktop telephony experience. CommAssistant can be used by subscribers either on a MetaSwitch softswitch or a legacy Class 5 switch. The Windows-application includes a simple but powerful toolbar on the Windows Task Bar to provide instant access to the most common voice telephony functions, including presence status updates, searching contacts lists, placing calls using click-to-dial, and changing setting of calling features such as call forwarding and do-not-disturb. Other features include click-to-dial support within applications such as Microsoft Outlook, remote office support, and a notification icon in the Windows system tray for new voice and fax messages.

CommAssistant is in field trials and should be available to customers in March.