Tony Cripps, principal analyst at Ovum believes that Skype fills one of the obvious application gaps on Microsoft’s smartphone platform, but that this first beta represents a baby step on the path to a larger vision.

“At least in its initial guise, Skype for Windows Phone offers a fairly typical Skype experience on smartphones running as a standalone application. We expect this to change in future iterations with Skype becoming a more pervasive part of the Windows Phone software platform and experience, with its functionality integrated tightly with applications and services across the phone increasing its utility.

“Moreover, this is an important step in Microsoft’s strategy to make Skype a ubiquitous – and unavoidable – part of its product portfolio, integrated wherever it makes sense to do so. A pervasive Skype has much greater potential to disrupt existing models of communication than one that is dependent on users proactively choosing to install it.

“In this capacity it could begin to act as a social “glue” helping to drive usage of the service and furthering sales of Skype-enabled Microsoft products considerably in future. It could eventually help blur the lines between business users and consumers with Skype increasingly seen as simply a convenient tool to communication available anywhere.”

For the past week there have been rumors that a Skype purchase was imminent, but all of the speculation revolved around Facebook and Google as the new custodian of the VoIP calling and online communications icon. Microsoft swooped out of nowhere to announce that it has agreed to purchase Skype for $8.5 billion in cash–the largest purchase in the history of Microsoft.

It will be interesting to see what Microsoft does with Skype and how it integrates Skype services with other Microsoft products. The Microsoft press release mentions tie-ins with Xbox and Kinect, as well as integration with Lync and Outlook. There are many innovative ways that Skype can add value and enable better real-time communications for Microsoft products.

Of course, I’m sure Microsoft is glad that it was not the steward of Skype the past couple months when it was discovered that Skype for Android exposes personal data on the smartphone platform, or the revelation that Skype for Mac leaves Mac OS X systems open to dangerous compromise. Those types of events would not be good for Microsoft’s reputation, and hopefully the first thing Microsoft will do with Skype is tighten the development process and implement better security practices to ensure those things don’t happen on its watch. 

For more details, read the Microsoft press release: Microsoft to Acquire Skype