“It’s no secret the USB webcam business is suffering due to the growth of embedded webcams. Consumers particularly are not concerned with high definition videoconferencing. … Good enough quality is fine when you are talking to friends and family,” Forrester Analyst Phil Karcher said.

Karcher believes that consumers will pick up on high definition (HD) videoconferencing slower than enterprises: “While desktop videoconferencing is becoming more popular in both the consumer and business markets, business buyers have a stronger appetite for high-quality audio and video.”

Due to this “good enough quality” attitude from consumers, some major players have exited from the webcam business, like Cisco. At the same time, consumer-oriented webcam vendors are targeting enterprises, like Logitech. The vendor recently evolved it’s classic desktop webcam into a small-group camera [shown left]. By pushing the roundtable BCC950 ConferenceCam, Logitech hopes to fill a niche for businesses craving video conferencing systems at palatable prices (compare a $249.99 conference cam to a $5,000 room-based video solution).

Karcher says that Logitech isn’t the only consumeristic vendor pushing into the enterprise market. Both Google and Skype offer free and professional video conferencing products and services for organizations to experiment with.  

“ The consumerization of IT is accelerating this trend. Its also more viable with the cloud allowing small start ups to scale up their operations by experimenting in the consumer markets before introducing more hardened enterprise offerings.”

Time will tell whether this enterprise experimentation will be enough to keep USB webcam vendors afloat.

Not only do users want to use their own devices, but they want to use applications familiar to them to get work done. “Users want consumer hardware, as well as consumer-type devices,” Finneran said. While tools like Microsoft Lync are ok, LinkedIn is preferred by many users, as is Skype over other real-time video products developed specifically for the enterprise by the likes of Avaya and Polycomm he added.

BYOD is all well and good, but this is where a mobility strategy must come into play. It’s not crucial for IT to make users happy by allowing them to use their iPhones and applications they enjoy for work, Finneran said. It is critical for IT to create a balancing act with users, however, by making them accessible and enable them to easily reach the right person at the right time, while offering a certain level of support for certain devices.

“If you can’t beat them, join them — responsibly,” he said, noting that some companies have even begun offering something of an app store for its employees and their devices. Companies are learning that if the UC product or application is not easy to use or familiar to the employee, they won’t use it.

But the responsibilities of IT are not changing with the addition of the mobility component. “Their responsibilities are staying the same with a different set of tools in a different environment,” Finneran said. In developing a mobile strategy, identifying the right tools (Apple iPhones, Android and Blackberry devices, tablets and applications) appropriate for the company and user, and ensuring security without breaking the bank is where IT should begin.

From there, different use cases should be established — like what applications can/should be downloaded on the device, depending on the user’s job function, for example. IT also must consider device issues “from the cradle to the grave,” Finneran noted, explaining that the policy must address what happens when users lose or purchase a new device or leave the company, because IT can’t worry about whether or not they can wipe a device after a person has been terminated.

Since the game is always changing in mobility, a mobile policy just can’t be set and forgotten. BYOA is a major change and new struggle for IT departments, so addressing these issues early on can mitigate problems for enterprises later.

“The goal with mobility is to enable business transactions based on what tools are available, not necessarily making users smile,” Finneran said.

BYOD and BYOA are the little issues enterprises are facing now in the grand scheme of things, but the ability to improve business with available tools in a responsible fashion, all while balancing user experience will be the grand-scale concern as the need for mobility continues to grow.

Dissension in the ranks at Microsoft has arguably contributed to the company’s ineffective acquisition assimilations and habitually slow product releases. IB Times’ Jake Thompson spelled out three reasons why Microsoft’s buyout of Skype will fail, ultimately tracking back to Microsoft’s dysfunctional corporate culture.

With Skype, Microsoft has committed to an important change in its organizational structure that may help the company overcome some of the obstacles it faced with past acquisitions. The Skype division will be reporting directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer—a new strategy for Microsoft.

Tony Bates, the president of Microsoft’s new Skype division and former CEO of Skype, told the Seattle Times that this shift is “not just about the organization; it’s sort of a statement of strategic intent and strategic alignment.”

Bates will be the point person in charge of heading up efforts to integrate Skype with other Microsoft products. In reporting directly to Ballmer, Bates may be able to skirt some of Microsoft’s notorious in-fighting and focus on connecting Skype and Microsoft and building business for the Skype division.

More insight into the Microsoft/Skype deal:

Microsoft/Skype: Once skeptical UC pros reassessing enterprise Skype

Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5B: What does it mean for unified communications?

With bated breath: The Microsoft-Skype Deal

Is Microsoft the perfect vessel for Skype to finally break into the enterprise?

Maybe. Enterprise unified communications (UC) pros have been consistently ambivalent if not outright skeptical of Skype’s ability to be a true enterprise UC player–and that includes IT pros using Skype in their environments today.

David Gurlé, vice president and general manager of Skype Enterprise (Skype’s enterprise business unit), told me in January that Skype has no intention of competing with incumbent UC vendors, such as Cisco and Avaya:

“We are not in the substitution market. We are in the complementary market,” he said. “It’s kind of an overlay across other communications infrastructure and application that people have deployed.”

But that is likely to change under Microsoft, which holds a large chunk of the overall UC market with its Lync 2010 server and legacy Office Communications Server (OCS) footprint. Microsoft spokespeople declined to comment specifically on how Skype might fit into Lync, which has its own desktop video software, but Microsoft’s press release offers a taste of what’s to come:

Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities. Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

It seems pretty clear why any UC vendor aligns with Skype: access to its user base.

This is why Logitech LifeSize recently announced its federation capabilities with Skype video conferencing a few weeks ago. Avaya, which plans to federate with Skype later this year, is also after its half-a-billion registered user base. No word yet from those vendors about what the acquisition will mean for these relationships.

Aside from the fact that Skype has been a juicy acquisition prospect for some time, Microsoft obviously sees the value in owning Skype’s massive user base. The dividends are probably much higher for Microsoft on the consumer side (especially federating Skype with its Xbox Live community and Kinect products), but don’t count it out for the enterprise. UC pros are looking for some quality, reliability and support reassurances before embracing Skype. Say what you will about Microsoft’s track record with product development (yes, we’ve heard the “Blue Screen of Skype” jokes–and love them), but it has a huge install base and has earned a heck of a lot more trust from UC pros than Skype has.

UPDATE: An Avaya spokeswoman says Avaya will continue to “honor that agreement” to support Skype for its customers.

I know some of you are big-time Skype fans, but when you have call quality issues when talking to Skype via Skype, there’s a problem.

Let me back up a bit.

I’ve never been a Skype user, which probably strikes a lot of people as absurd. But I don’t have a webcam or any close friends and family outside the States, so the 472 other communications tools available to me have worked just fine.

Yet like a lot of consumers (and enterprises), I’ve been looking at the bills from my service provider and wondering if I could reduce telecom costs. Did I really need a land line? Especially when Skype charges $3 per month for unlimited U.S. and Canada calls, which makes the let’s-not-even-go-there monthly rate my cable company charges for residential VoIP all the more heart-wrenching. If this were just a personal decision, it’d be easy. But I work from home occasionally, and my job relies so heavily the ability to understand people on the phone clearly enough that I can accurately quote them. Even with the vast improvements to mobile networks in terms of quality and coverage, cell phone interviews are still a last resort for me.

I figured it couldn’t hurt to give Skype a shot though. Loved ones always make the best guinea pigs, so I first tried making a personal call first to someone who was on a cell phone within a two-mile radius. Quality was perfect on both ends. Feeling bolder, I used it for a phone interview I had scheduled with a U.K.-based market analyst for a news story. Despite getting the green light from Skype’s built-in bandwidth/VoIP call quality testing tool beforehand, the call was pretty awful. The audio was so muffled — not to the point that it was unintelligible, but enough that I found myself spending more energy trying to understand the subject’s words than his meaning.

I chalked up the problems to it being an international call (but was not eager to test Skype for business again). A few weeks later, I wound up working on SearchUnifiedCommunications.com’s recent story about whether enterprises will ever warm up to Skype for business communications. When I interviewed David Gurlé, vice president and general manager of Skype Enterprise (their enterprise business unit), he dialed into the conference line (unsurprisingly) via Skype. I happened to be working from home and using our residential VoIP.

Brought straight to you from the University of Epic Fail, my interview with Skype (via Skype) was like trying to talk to someone who was on a cell phone in the middle of nowhere (though I’m pretty sure they were calling from New York). I had to ask for sentences and entire topics to be repeated multiple times because the quality was just so, so bad and the audio often indecipherable. I couldn’t believe that I was hearing them (well, sort of) tell me about how wonderful their quality and reliability were. It felt like a bad joke.

Maybe I just have bad Skype juju or maybe the problem was on my service provider’s end (though I had no other issues that day).  Clearly, there are businesses and IT shops (granted, it seems are they are mostly SMBs) that have no problem with Skype. One IT pro in last week’s story even told me he has experienced more outages and performance problems with his LAN than with Skype. Still, it got me wondering — if Skype can’t even ensure the quality of their own communications, what Fortune 500 is going to rely on them?

If you’re at a large enterprise IT organization that’s using Skype, we’d love to hear from you. Send me an email or comment below.