This story is part of Connected Planet's coverage of TIA 2011: Inside the Network, in Dallas, May 17-20. Read all the stories this week at TIA2011Connected.com.

Metaswitch Networks announced at TIA 2011 this week the next step in its recent strategic foray in mobility—a communicator application that it hopes will redefine the VoIP softphone for corporate enterprises and remote mobile workers.

The company’s CommPortal Communicator follows a number of recent mobile moves by Metaswitch, including the March announcement of the company’s Thrutu mobile content sharing app for Android phones, as well as last month’s acquisition of Colibria, a Rich Communications Suite specialist. The CommPortal Communicator is available for Windows desktop users and for iPhone/iPad and Android devices for mobile users.

The new portal-based app seeks to ease many of the traditional difficulties involved in configuring and using softphones, said Simon Dredge, technical marketing director at Metaswitch. “Setting up softphones can be very complex, with a lot of people not even knowing what PESQ [for voice quality] means or whether or not they need a proxy,” he said. “We’re trying to simplify them for wide-scale deployment by enabling group provisioning and the ability for users to download a pre-configured softphone. That makes the process of introducing softphones more efficient and cost-effective.”

The CommPortal Communicator allows contacts to be imported from enterprise Outlook systems using LDAP, and automatic population of social media contact information via XMPP. Local presence and availability can be automatically or manually managed. Communications options include HD voice and video, as well as multi-party calls and instant message.

“IM has really exploded for business use,” Dredge said, noting research that has indicated that 32 percent of the 47 billion IMs sent daily are business-related. “But, video may be the real growth engine for business. We’ve seen Skype and some other options start finding their way into the enterprise, but often it’s under the radar without an IT manager’s approval. As the manager, you can’t really track these users using all these different apps.”

Metaswitch believes the CommPortal Communicator could help get everyone in the enterprise on the same page for those apps, including the growing forces of “home-sourced” and mobile workers. “About 95 percent of home-sourced employees are working on smartphones, but they are sort of an unknown quantity,” Dredge said. “You still want them to have that enterprise quality of service to fall back on.”

Dredge said the new offering could also be part of a managed service for hosted VoIP service providers. “A lot of those offerings avoid anything having to do with the handset because that can be the expensive piece, but this is a more cost-effective way of doing it.”