Mutare is a company empowering organizations to re-imagine a better way to connect. Through the company’s transformative voice security, digital voice, and text messaging solutions, the company makes communications with colleagues, customers, and prospects simple, secure, and effective. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Mutare Vice President and Product Manager Rich Quattrocchi to learn more.
Rich Quattrocchi’s Background
Quattrocchi has 25 years of experience in leadership positions advancing digital transformation and network security software solutions for technology innovators.
“I am an active member of InfraGard, a public-private partnership with the FBI focused on mitigating cybersecurity threats to critical U.S. infrastructure. I am also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) focused on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence technologies dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of mankind. I am currently Vice President and Product Manager for Mutare Software, an independent software developer specializing in enterprise voice channel communications and security solutions,” said Quattrocchi.
Formation Of Mutare
How did the idea for Mutare come together? Quattrocchi replied:
Mutare got its start writing third-party voice processing applications for the VMX/Octel enterprise voicemail platform in the early 1980s. Back then, most of our applications were custom IVRs (Interactive Voice Response systems). At the time, Octel was offering an enterprise “visual voicemail” solution which could deliver voicemail messages to the employee’s email inbox. The problem was it required a client application to be installed and maintained on every user’s desktop computer.
We saw that as an opportunity and developed the first-of-its-kind clientless voicemail-to-email application. The application could access voicemail messages directly from your native email client on your computer, such as Outlook. Our approach simplified workflows for the user, made IT administration easier, and eliminated help desk tickets. The product has continued to evolve over the years, eventually replacing legacy voicemail altogether with a modern, lightweight voicemail solution geared toward today’s text-based users that delivers transcribed voice messages to email, instant messaging, SMS and collaboration platforms, such as Microsoft Teams. We also added user features, such as personal blocklists to stop spammers from leaving messages. Users loved the feature and asked if we could stop the spam calls from ringing the phone in the first place.
We responded by launching our Voice Traffic Filter, which, today, is our flagship offering. This enterprise application filters out unwanted calls at the network edge, eliminating the disruption and threat of unwanted nuisance and nefarious calls.
It is no wonder we chose the name “Mutare” for our organization. It is Latin for “change” and acknowledges that continual evolution is necessary to thrive in an ever-changing business environment.
Challenges Faced
What challenges do you face in your day to day? Quattrocchi acknowledged:
We have always been a forward-looking company, finding new ways to make life better for our business customers through technology. That is both one of our greatest assets as well as one of our greatest challenges, as we often recognize problems long before our clients know they exist. That is certainly the case with the increasing threat of cybercrime intrusion through the business phone system. While businesses have been focused on addressing potential intrusions carried through email and the web, threat actors have quietly moved into the voice channel as a convenient, low-risk entry point for their criminal activity. So, we find ourselves in the dual position of developing effective voice products while raising customer awareness.
What’s more, in this field, we can never rest. Our Voice Traffic Filter is already the most comprehensive voice channel threat defense system on the market. Now, with the advent of AI, those capabilities must continue to expand as bad actors seeking to connect and con their targets into divulging protected information are doing so with increased effectiveness, using AI technologies, like deep fake voice cloning. The key to our continued success, then, rests squarely on our agility in the face of emerging and complex business challenges. As a natural extension of our ability to protect the enterprise phone system, we have been asked to provide the same protection to mobile endpoints that have increased in importance with the work-from-home movement prompted by the COVID pandemic.
Core Products
What are Mutare’s core products and features?
“Our core offering is our Voice Traffic Filter, designed specifically to filter out unwanted voice traffic to the enterprise. It is far and away the most powerful voice call filtering application on the market today and is designed to detect and deflect both nuisance calls, like robocalls and spammers, as well as truly nefarious voice phishers, scammers, and cyber thieves. Its filtering actions are applied at the network edge before those calls have a chance to reach their intended targets. It not only significantly reduces disruption and productivity loss due to annoying unwanted calls but also protects employees and their organizations from exposure to cybercriminal activity,” Quattrocchi explained. “The application is built with five layers of protection that include a massive dynamic database of unwanted callers; organization-specific custom rules; an exclusive ‘threat radar’ call analytics system that applies AI and machine learning to detect and deflect calls that fit patterns consistent with nefarious activity; STIR/SHAKEN call attestation scoring integration; and a unique, ‘do no harm’ voice CAPTCHA system that can be applied to further vet the legitimacy of unknown callers. The application works with any existing IT infrastructure and can be implemented on-premise or in the cloud for easy integration with other enterprise/contact center voice management and security (SIEM) platforms. Our extension into mobile device protection has us focused on the dual threat of voice phishing (vishing) as well as SMS phishing (smishing).”
Evolution Of Mutare’s Technology
How has Mutare’s technology evolved over time? “Our software has evolved dramatically from when we were writing programs in a language dedicated to one specific voice messaging platform. As new platforms and related programming languages emerged, the nature of our offerings evolved as well and are now completely platform-agnostic. With the advent of cloud computing, we offer our customers the option of on-premise or cloud implementation,” noted Quattrocchi. “We have taken our cloud offering one step further and established our own cloud data center, which not only provides full control and protection over our customers’ data but also is foundational to our ability to easily integrate with other cloud-based technologies and platforms (CCaaS, UCaaS, etc.). We continue to leverage emerging technologies to enhance our voice messaging and network protection solutions, most recently with the application of AI for more effective detection of potential criminal intrusion through the voice channel.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Mutare’s most significant milestones? Quattrocchi cited the following:
— We wrote the first IVR application, called Message Desk, for the Octel Designer platform in the early 1980s.
— We created the first clientless enterprise voicemail-to-email application, which put us on the map as a major player in unified communications.
— We were the first company to add voice message text transcription to enterprise voicemail notifications.
— We developed and launched our own web-based, platform-agnostic enterprise voice messaging solution. Mutare Voice, with its many advanced features and admin controls, is still among our core offerings today.
— We became a player in the healthcare segment by adding a HIPAA-compliant, secure messaging solution to our product portfolio.
— We created the first truly viable Voice Traffic Filter for the enterprise that filters out unwanted nuisance and nefarious calls in all of their many and evolving forms (robocalls, spam calls, scammers, spoofers, vishers, toll fraudsters, spam storms/TDos attacks).
— We created a cloud solution for Voice Traffic Filter enabling integration with contact center (CCaaS) platforms.
— We added new voice data extraction and telemetry capabilities to our Voice Traffic Filter, enabling integration with security SIEM/XDR systems.
— We added enterprise-grade mobile protection against vishing and smishing on iOS and Android phones.
Customer Success Stories
When I asked Quattrocchi about some customer success stories, he highlighted a very large media company – which was in the middle of a proof of concept for Mutare’s Voice Traffic Filter application. “Our initial analysis of their call data revealed that upwards to 25% of their incoming call traffic was unwanted. One major distinction for our application is that, unlike those that simply label a call as spam, ours blocks the call at the network edge so it never reaches its intended target. After several weeks running the filter, the systems admin for the organization turned off active filtering to see if there was a difference. Within minutes the administrative assistant for the company’s CFO was down in his office demanding to know why they were suddenly getting so many spam calls,” Quattrocchi reflected. “The filter was turned back on and the sale was finalized. This was just one example of a company sensing they had a problem with unwanted calls but not recognizing the full extent until they experienced in real time what life is like with and without those intrusions. It was the perfect way to demonstrate the value of our application. We continue to offer organizations a free Voice Traffic Assessment using our Voice Traffic Filter technology and their actual call data so they can better understand the level of disruption and threat unwanted calls are exacting on their operations.”
Total Addressable Market
What is the total addressable market (TAM) size that Mutare is pursuing? “We estimate that market at approximately $1.2 billion in annually recurring SaaS revenues excluding the mobile application,” Quattrocchi assessed.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Mutare from its competition? Quattrocchi pointed out:
We are the definitive leader in voice traffic defense. Our Voice Traffic Filter application features-set is unrivaled; no other solution even comes close. It includes five layers of protection with multiple technical controls within each layer. The layers include the largest dynamic database of unwanted calls in the world, STIR/SHAKEN score integration, custom rules, Telephone Denial of Service prevention, personal blocklists, protection for both inbound and outbound calls, and powerful analytics for more nuanced detection of suspicious call activity.
— Unlike other applications that may simply label a call as suspicious but still pass it through, our application detects and deflects those calls at the network edge. This is a critical security strategy and a true differentiator for the Voice Traffic Filter, as most competing solutions allow dubious and nefarious traffic into the network, and then attempt to determine each call’s legitimacy only after it reaches its endpoint. Our approach not only significantly reduces time-wasting disruptions, but also protects employees and their organizations against potential exposure to criminal elements.
— We designed the system to “do no harm.” Our application has a built-in “fail-safe” feature in the form of a unique voice CAPTCHA that allows for additional vetting of flagged calls or those with ambiguous trust status to make sure wanted callers pass through while bots are blocked. We ensure the enterprise admin has complete control over the ability to configure order of operation and whether to drop, divert, or pass calls based on enterprise needs.
— Our custom rules manager provides configuration for both inbound and outbound calls. Rules are created around caller ID, called party ID, CNAM and STIR/SHAKEN attestation scores, and support number ranges/partial numbers down to country codes.
— We are a smaller company that has never lost its entrepreneurial spirit. This allows us to always be looking ahead so we can adapt our products rapidly and with laser-focused precision in response to ever-changing market needs. When it comes to protection for the voice channel, our agility allows us to stay one step ahead of emerging threats.
Future Company Goals
What are some of Mutare’s future company goals? “Our goal is to be the leader in voice threat defense and continue to evolve our offer for mobile, premise, cloud, hybrid cloud, CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS and collaboration applications worldwide,” Quattrocchi concluded.
