Skype For Business?

Skype is gunning for the business market, according to CNET's News.com Forbes also has a point of view.

I received a summary of some of the key comments the founder of Skype made yesterday on a video presentation at the Internet Telephony conference. I wonder if he used SKYPE video which is in the works?

Today Skype CEO and co-founder Niklas Zennström announced the Skype for Business strategic initiative from Internet Telephony (http://www.tmcnet.com/itexpo/) in Los Angeles. Appearing via video conference from London, he pledged to deliver Skype for Business in 2005.

Key remarks:

Skype today will hit 12 million users, we have users from every country in the world.

Skype is developing new premium products for the base offering. Prior to launching the business offering, Skype will deliver:

-SkypePlus with voicemail and expanded conference calling ability
-SkypeIn, phone numbers that will allow people to call from the PSTN to Skype
-API, which is already being implemented by our partner Siemen’s with their soon to be released Gigaset USB device for cordless phones
- Certification program to aid consumers and hardware manufacturers

Skype’s business model understands plain old telephony s is a commodity and we understand that we must have a great solution and a low cost.

Skype’s revenue model is to sell premium services, and our first premium service, SkypeOut, as of yesterday, has 200,000 users.

We’ve taken a survey and found that 48% of Skype users have already used their Skype application for business communications.

The Skype for Business offering will address ways to better serve the business community and targeted toward individuals and workgroups, not CIOs for enterprise wide deployments.

Skype’s business offering will allow for the grouping of accounts to centralize billing and allow line managers cost control for their user base.

We will allow call grouping – allowing multiple clients to ring simulataeously.

We invite business to become global with us. For example a company may have a London phone number but be based elsewhere.

These ideas plus presence function, IM, group messaging will allow better, richer communications which just makes sense as the computer is increasingly the center of much professional work-life.

Skype does not aim to replace the PBX – rather we’ll provide easy ways to integrate with directories and establish natural extensions similar to email linking.

We can’t do all of this ourselves and are looking for partners -- resellers, hardware makers, system integrators, consultants - to help deploy and take advantage of the revenue opportunities Skype software offers.

It’s not the big that beats the small, it’s the fast that beats the slow.

My view. The old guard at many of the phone giants around the world had better start looking at the new technologies that will replace the standard PSTN.

VoIP is to telephony what cellular was. The difference is we're only at the stage right now with the current big time offerings of being where the car radio phone was before cellular launched. Many a phone company executive back then questioned the viability of cellular. That same type of thinking has been inside the RBOC's and PTT's for years when it comes to VoIP.

Companies like Popular Telephony (Peerio), SipPhone and Skype are led by visionary disruptors who play the game to build a business based on technology that the masses can easily use, once they learn about them and deployment becomes easy.

To see who the winners will be in telecom look at who is already playing in the VoIP space for real. Then imagine how smart they can be by teaming up with the disruptors, not in driving them into the ground. Those type of match ups are the furture of telephony. For the rest, who will all be about FUD, they are only planning their own funerals.

Comments

[Tom Keating]

Nice blog post Andy. I was at Niklas' keynote address at Internet Telephony Expo and he brought up some interesting plans for Skype's future.

Lots of news outlets are posting stories on Skype's news, especially the Skype for Business announcement made at the show. I've seen USA Today with an article, as well as Forbes.com and ZDNet.

Interestingly enough, ZDNet took exact quotes from his keynote address at the show and didn't reference where they got the quotes. Bad journalism in my opinion. Always reference your sources!

Anyway, check out my take on Skype's news:
Skype Keynote