Telecommunications Online — E-Bay’s Skype Ups Its Game, Goes After Business Market

Stephen Heiser — 26 January 2007
Skype, the telecommunications service owned by E-Bay, has announced that it has extended its Skype for Business offering in response to continued demand among businesses around the world that use Skype to communicate with customers and colleagues. Currently Skype has 171 million registered users, and is growing very rapidly in the U.S. and overseas.

Business users have always been part of the Skype strategy and make up more than 30 percent of Skype’s global community. In a recent survey of 250 businesses using Skype, 95 percent claimed to have saved on their telecommunications costs and 80 percent claimed that using Skype had increased employee productivity. The survey also revealed that 62 percent of the companies using Skype communicate easily with customers and 76 percent said they work more closely with colleagues because Skype is so easy to use.

I can’t find any further details on this survey, so view it with the usual pinch of salt. All the same, Skype in particular and voice over IP (VoIP) in general have an obvious appeal to organizations that wish to save money and to improve convenience for their workers.

In this piece, Irwin Lazar speculates on Skype’s becoming the basis for company-wide collaboration services. It is already part of the way there, offering instant messaging and video conferencing as standard in addition to telephony, and running on M$ Windows, Apple Mac and Linux environments.

There are numerous software add-ons to Skype that offer further features (some more serious than others). There is also a speakerphone for it from Polycom.

We use Skype as the default voice communications method within Bloor Research. I also find it helpful during suppliers’ briefings over the telephone or Web, as I have a headset that plugs into my PC. This leaves my hands free for shuffling papers or using the keyboard, and saves getting a crick in the neck through tucking a handset there for an hour or more. Using the SkypeOut service lets me call ordinary (PSTN) telephone numbers anywhere in the world at low cost.

I haven’t tried it yet, but NCH’s Uplink software lets you link Skype to rival VoIP services that use SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). It costs just $US27.50 at the moment. There are other, more capable methods for making this link, but at increased cost and complexity

One area where Internet telephony is not advancing is in the sky. Last summer, Boeing stopped its in-flight IP service, Connexion by Boeing, through lack of demand. This is a mixed blessing. Being online while aloft must have been useful for portable PC users; being sat next to someone using Skype through his or her PC must have been a pain in the auricle. It’s bad enough sitting near mobile phone users on trains but at least that’s not usually for as long.