Skype

Can Google Voice Crush Skype?

When the economy was booming and things were looking up, eBay decided to diversify by purchasing the online VoIP provider Skype. Times are more troubled now and there have been talks recently that eBay may put Skype back on the market. There are also rumors that the founders of Skype may want to buy their baby back and develop its potential better than they feel eBay has done.

They may want to hurry up with dumping Skype because they are about to face some serious competition from Google Voice. This article details some reasons that Google Voice may beat out Skype head to head such as:

• Routing and forwarding re-defined
• A new definition of ‘call screening’
• On the fly switching
• Read your calls

and…

• The Google god

You can check out How Google Voice Can Kill Skype to get the details behind those bullet points and find out whether Google Voice may signal the end of the Skype era.

Skype Looks for Enterprise Legitimacy with New Offering

Skype has been around for awhile and most people are at least familiar with its existence. Skype was one of the first to popularize the concept of leveraging the global networking capabilities of the Internet, and voice over IP (VoIP) to enable free, or virtually free calls to anywhere in the world.

Skype is more than just a voice system. It essentially offers a pseudo-unified communications experience, combining VoIP with video conferencing and instant messaging. It wraps all of those features up in a sort of peer-to-peer (P2P) social networking infrastructure.

As popular as it has been with tech-savvy consumers, especially the frugal ones, Skype has long posed a dilemma for enterprises. Few organizations have actually embraced or adopted Skype in any official capacity, but many have had to struggle with what to do about users who install and use Skype on company PC’s over the company network. There are bandwidth issues, compliance issues, and security issues just to name a few. Simply banning or blocking Skype has been one approach.

Skype announced a new offering that seeks to change how Skype is perceived by enterprise customers. Playing on the booming growth of enterprise VoIP, and the growing popularity of SIP trunking, Skype is Beta testing a new offering called Skype for SIP for Business Users. The new offering opens up some new streams of revenue for Skype, and unique possibilities for organizations- especially combined with direct SIP trunking in Microsoft OCS 2007 R2.

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Callwave’s Fuze Brings UC to SMB’s

TMCNet’s Rich Tehrani recently wrote about a UC offering from Callwave called Fuze. Unified communications can level the playing field for smaller companies that want to compete with the big boys. In this instance, Callwave is leveraging their approach to unified communications to produce a unified communications solutions aimed at small and medium businesses, and, in the process, squaring off with the big boys in their own arena like Microsoft, Cisco, and Avaya. Fuze appears to provide a fairly comprehensive approach to unified communications, including email integration, Skype-based audio and video conferencing, media sharing, follow-me functionality, and more. What is most unique about Fuze though is that it is a web-based solution, with no software to install and no special equipment to deploy. That could be a tremendous advantage, and it could be an achilles heel. The product is in Beta now, projected for a summer 2008 release. Fuze may be worth taking a look at if you are evaluating UC solutions for a small or medium business.

Power Users Push UC Envelope

Companies are typically slow and cautious to adopt new technologies. That is partially a function of due diligence and testing to ensure that any new technology or application will function properly and provide value before committing to adopting it. The larger the enterprise, the slower the process of migrating to new technologies or updating applications. Almost every organization has their share of power users though who push the technology envelope and start using bleeding edge technologies as soon as they hit the streets. These users tend to be the “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” crowd and simply attach their rogue devices and install their rogue applications and figure out how to make them work from within the enterprise. In general, this behavior should be discouraged. It can cause problems with the user desktop and the network. It can introduce unknown risks and make the enterprise network open to threats that the network and security administrators are not even aware of. With some technologies though, they reach a sort of “Hundredth Monkey” critical mass and resistance becomes futile. In those cases, organizations are better off trying to figure out the business benefits of the technology and how to incorporate it in a logical and secure way, rather than wasting resources trying to fight it. This article on SearchUnifiedCommunications addresses three consumer unified communications products which have gained in popularity and could serve as a pseudo test environment for organizations looking to define the business value of unified communications.