Metaswitch Networks announced that it won the 2010 Queen's Award for Enterprise.

During its 29-year history, this is the fourth Queen's Award achieved by Metaswitch, which won the award for its MetaSphere application server.

The Queen's Awards for Enterprise are highly prestigious awards for outstanding achievement by businesses in Innovation, International Trade and Sustainable Development. The awards are made annually by HM The Queen, and are only given for the highest levels of excellence demonstrated in each category.

The MetaSphere application server helps service providers to deploy residential or business voice services over traditional legacy networks or broadband networks. The server is built on Internet Protocol architecture and includes support for a wide range of traditional telephone switching capabilities.

Common MetaSphere applications include replacement of traditional end office telephone switches, business Voice over IP, hosted PBX (News - Alert), advanced voicemail and unified messaging.

"Our commitment to high standards is a hallmark of our success, and our strength in achieving innovation after innovation sets us apart from our global competition," said John Lazar (News - Alert), chairman of Metaswitch Networks. "This Award is further recognition for the tireless work and ingenuity of all Metaswitch employees, and I am extremely proud that their effort and talent has been recognized."

According to the judges of the Queen's Award, Metaswitch has had a commercial success with outstanding excellence in 'export achievement.' This award is Metaswitch's first in the 'Innovation' category and follows only weeks after the company was yet again ranked highly in the Sunday Times '100 Best Companies to Work For' league table.

Recently, the company delivered "the first" portable protocol solution for signaling and routing in G.709 Optical Transport Networks.

OTN provides a transparent, hierarchical network that supports the transport of both packet and optical traffic, greatly increasing network efficiencies. Metaswitch delivers standards-based OTN extensions of its Integrated Control Plane software to enable system vendors to dynamically signal and route connections in an OTN network.