Google is building WebRTC into Chrome. WebRTC code and standards will let web developers and designers build realtime IM, voice and video into web apps and browser plug-ins. This milestone means we could see WebRTC apps in Chrome in the next few months. Nimbuzz and others are working on it. This removes one obstacle to Skype for Browsers, without downloading a fat client. How soon will Microsoft’s Internet Explorer follow Chrome? Or will it adopt another technology, making choices harder for developers and users?
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I spoke with Dany Bouchedid, President and CEO of COLOTRAQ at ITExpo Los Angeles, a large VoIP conference. He leads the Technology Channel Association’s board of trustees. Agents like COLOTRAQ resell carrier services and manufacturer hardware. The TCA is rebuilding trust between these sales agents and the carriers after a time when the channel was “known as the wild, wild West.” Unscrupulous agent conduct produced defensive measures by vendors: long and complicated contracts, vetting delays, and unfavorable terms that hurt the whole channel. Skype is taking its fifth or sixth stab at reseller channels with Skype Connect, where company calls go through the Skype network. Before this Skype sold Skype credits through grocers, Skype co-branded headsets and other gear through big box stores, small business kits in parts of Europe, and subscriptions through online affiliate programs. Each channel has its own peculiarities so it’s not unusual to hire channel managers from and for each channel. A vendor like Skype can take a long time to earn a reputation that’s worth something with the channel. Generically, resellers want a vendor to trust, that makes them money, offering competitive terms, keeping end customers delighted and dependent, that you can reach on the phone or by email, and that listens well to the channel’s changing needs. Bonus points for making them smarter than their customers, positioning them as better than their competitors, and sharing a brand that drives gets customers to call. A tall order. I’ve been there, in the last century. I managed one of the first chains to carry the IBM and Apple PCs, trained hundreds of dealers west of the Mississippi to sell the first Compaq luggable PC, and managed value-added resellers and retailers for Wang Labs. Channels can be labor intensive on the vendor’s part, especially when establishing yourself in the market. Channels can expose vendors like Skype to substantial business and brand risk, so education, regulation and program design are part of the game. If only channels didn’t provide such a great way to expand your reach, to leverage trust between sellers and local markets, reps and and niche markets. Call me at +1-510-343-5664, Skype me, follow @SkypeJournal and @evanwolf. Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats. Voxeo Labs’ architect Jose de Castro announced Phono just now at jQuery Boston (#jqcon) to a crowd of 500 web developers.
Free. Skinnable. Perfect for mashups and rapid prototyping. You have to be a VoIP programmer to use one of the SIP services. A new generation of middleware makes coding for communications easier and accessible to the millions of programmers who write web and mobile applications. Voxeo, Twilio, BT/Ribbit, Telefonica/Jajah, and others offer calling as a cloud service. Phono extends this access to JavaScript, one of the easiest and most widely used browser programming languages. Combined with Tropo, Voxeo’s application platform, write your hosted app once with Phono and it runs on multiple UIs and channels: browser, telephone, instant messaging, and others. Bonus: The Phono SDK is open source so you can point your $.phono() jQuery calls to your choice of communication platforms. Download. Documentation. Demos. Forums. Sign up for an API Key. Phono on Twitter: @Tropo and on Facebook. Voxeo’s Dan York on how Phono rewires the realtime web.
A deal in to phases. 1. Starting in October 2010, Avaya will preinstall and promote Skype Connect in the United States. This allows Avaya’s customers to more easily choose Skype for outbound and inbound calls. 2. Starting in the second half of 2010, many of Avaya’s unified communication (UC) systems can work with the Skype network.
Speculating, the deal should bring more workplace traffic to Skype. Access to Skype’s users could give traction to Avaya’s video calling products. Skype must invent and deploy new technology to make this work since they are not building a full Skype client with SkypeKit. Skype will likely use the “thin client” model Skype mobile; Skype uses this user-experience-on-the-device-and-heavy-networking-in-a-server-farm approach for Verizon Android phones. Skype mobile runs its gateway servers in CALEA-compliant (ready for government eavesdropping) Verizon data centers to minimize latency. The engineering of a new Skype as a Platform cloud is non-trivial. Neither is integration across the whole Avaya application suite. From my “Phil Wolff’s 67 Reckless Predictions for 2010”
News release below the fold…
The slightly surreal launch video. Call me at +1-510-343-5664, Skype me, follow @SkypeJournal and @evanwolf. Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats. Guest post by Dave Michels, Verge1 CEO, @DaveMichels Want to know where enterprise UC is headed, take a look at Skype now. It seems counter-intuitive at first, but Skype is consistently ahead of the enterprise pack. Skype discovered IM before the enterprise, as well as softphones, presence, and desktop video. Skype has been a consumer service, but its impact on business is significant and growing. Almost a year ago, when eBay declared its intention to host an IPO for Skype, I wrote the Case to Buy Skype. My logic was based on the fact that every voice communication equipment maker was working hard on desktop clients, presence, and telephony and what a great boost to absorb Skype’s experience and user base. Skype is an usual solution, part carrier, part software, and increasingly (via partnerships) part hardware. EBay never got to an IPO with Skype, instead it spun it out and Silver Lake is now the majority owner. Silver Lake is also the majority owner of Avaya (and Nortel). My initial thought was Skype would be absorbed into Avaya, but I don’t think so any more. Skype is becoming a very valuable brand in this Internet area of communications – and the company appears to be focused on rapid growth. Rumors of Avaya and Skype working closer together are strong, and such a partnership will likely result in strengthening both brands. It is unlikely the brands will be merged, but if they were it would be more likely Avaya (and Nortel) would be absorbed into Skype. Skype is an amazing (free) service, amazing in its breadth, scope, and ability to monetize. The company is highly innovative and capturing a fair amount of attention at events such as last week’s Mobile World Congress and the huge Consumer Electronics Show in January. Skype’s service reach includes desktops around the globe, living rooms, mobile phones, and the board room. Skype-ready hardware devices include simple phones, televisions, cell phones, webcams, headsets, speaker saucers, and more (the PBX?). The service can be used for presence, audio calls, visual calls, and collaboration. Skype’s deal with Verizon last week at the Mobile World Congress shows how powerful Skype has become. Verizon and Skype made an exclusive agreement (sorry iPhone) to allow Verizon’s smartphone users to access Skype over Verizon’s 3G network with a new service called Skype Mobile. This is the first 3G calling plan with a mobile carrier’s blessing to bypass calling plan minutes and Verizon’s international calling rates. It serves as an admission by Verizon that VoIP is coming to wireless users (a voice plan is still required). But more telling is Verizon is using this as a way to differentiate and compete against AT&T and the iPhone. Andy Abramson describes the deal as a ‘If you Can’t Beat Them, Join Them’ strategy by Verizon. Skype now represents 12% of international long distance traffic, and getting a slice of it is better than losing it all together. As a consumer service, Skype has raised the expectations of corporate communications. Consumer services are supposed to be simple and limited when compared to enterprise class solutions. But at home with Skype, users connect with friends and relatives around the globe – visually and inexpensively. Incorporating Skype directly into the living room TV is a brilliant way to connect Grandma to her grandchildren. Not only is usage free, but it need only occur when both parties are at home (presence) and without overly complicated desktop computers. Can you do that with your customers and suppliers at the office? Possibly – but those ensuing conversations include words like "federation" and "H.323". Or just use Skype on the corporate PC (unless IT blocked it). But Skype is not content with being labeled a consumer service. "Skype for Business" still sounds a bit out of place, but it’s not. In fact, it is an established division of Skype recently headed by David Gurle. David reports directly to Skype President Josh Silverman and comes from Thomson Reuters where he migrated a messaging service into a collaboration service. Prior to that he headed (and created) Microsoft’s Real Time Collaboration Group (NetMeeting, Windows Messenger, Exchange IM, Exchange Conferencing Server, Live Communications Server and Office Communications Server, as well as Microsoft’s acquisition of PlaceWare). In his first public UC appearance since hire, David will be a keynote speaker at the UC Expo in London on March 11. It has been interesting to watch Skype’s attempts to penetrate business mature. There was a solution with ActionTec called VoSKY which used a gateway to convert communications from Skype’s packets to analog. This was a fairly simple solution, but it had issues with scalability and basic features. Scalability was a problem because it required PC type resources for just a few lines. Basic issues were a challenge because Skype does not support features like hunt groups, so it was best suited for outgoing calls. Then came a more comprehensive solution for Asterisk known as Skype For Asterisk. This Skype-to-SIP gateway offered the benefits of low-cost calling with Skype presence. It enabled users to make concurrent calls over one Skype account (from a desktop phone), transfer calls, and set/view status. Administration is done through a portal called the Skype BCP (Business Control Panel) where individual rights and prepaid balances are maintained. This solution was promising, but the Asterisk market isn’t sufficient for Skype’s appetite. Then came Skype For SIP. This solution requires much less custom integration and will be available to a large number of brands (initially certified for ShoreTel and Cisco). So far, it’s just SIP trunking – no real integration to Skype’s advanced features. The feature disparity between Skype for Asterisk and Skype for SIP is confusing. Matt Jordan, of Skype for Business, told me the disparities will be minimized and both will be rebranded as Skype Connect. Presumably, Skype Connect will be a SIP-based solution with various add-on modules for presence and potentially video. Skype’s influence over business communications is just beginning to be felt. It is increasingly used as a tool for direct communication and collaboration, and many enterprise communications vendors are beginning to see Skype (as Verizon did) more attractive as a partner than a competitor. Skype isn’t just a communications network. It is a network of users that are pushing the capabilities of communication and collaboration. Skype is utilized around the world at the desktop (computer and phone), the living room, and the car – for audio, visual, and textual communications. Something few enterprise communications vendors can claim. Reposted with permission from Unified Communication Strategies, an industry resource for enterprises, vendors, and system integrators Mark Spencer’s speech to the Spring 2009 Emerging Communications Conference at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. His slides on Slideshare. eComm2010a looks hot and may sell out. I’ll be speaking, and so will thought leaders from Skype, Google, Cisco, and a host of others. Ten thousand businesses asked for Skype for SIP when it launched in March. Eight months later the SFS Beta is now open to all users with business Skype names. Anyone with a business control panel, a corporate Skype name subject to the business terms of service and EULA, and a business SkypeIn phone number can now use Skype for SIP. I talked Monday with Skype’s Matthew Jordan about the latest update. Here are the details.
Skype for SIP connects your company’s phone switch to Skype. SkypeIn and Skype-to-Skype calls come in to your phone system, outbound calls can go over SkypeOut. VoIP people call a connection between your phone system and a phone company a "trunk." Some people call Skype for SIP "Skype trunking." SFS is a limited add-on.
SFS isn’t free. US$ 6.95 per month for each channel, one call at a time per channel. You have to rent an Online Skype phone number for your business. You pay for SkypeOut at published rates. At the moment, the Skype Global Rate is 2.1¢/minute in more than 36 countries. You’ll pay more for mobiles in most places. Unlike SkypeOut for consumers, Skype doesn’t allow or offer flat-rate calling plans. Calls coming in to your phone from the Skype ecosystem are free.
Many smart phone systems let you write rules for routing outbound calls. You might choose SkypeOut for international calls or if you haven’t the buying power to negotiate discounts with your phone company. Skype is building a distribution channel. They’ve partnered with PBX makers like ShoreTel, Cisco, and SIPfoundry. Together they have thousands of value added resellers (VARs) who serve local businesses. Those resellers will be eligible to earn affiliate referral commissions from Skype, although a separate program for VARs is not in place. Skype is talking with more PBX makers to make adding a Skype channel a built-in menu option.
Skype for SIP is an indirect sales effort. SFS partners with PBX makers, their VARs, to reach IT and telecom departments responsible for configuring telephone systems and buying telephone services. So Skype gets to know your Phone Guy. This gives Skype a beachhead in your company, a relationship to sell more Skype products, and a champion for Skype technology. For many institutions, it is much easier to buy more from an established vendor than a new one. This makes it easier for the rest of the org to adopt Skype. In addition to your phone team, SFS is attractive for remote workers. They can Skype to your company phones for free. It can be as simple as adding your company switchboard as a Skype contact. Your sales, marketing, and customer service teams may also like SFS. If you want to add Skype click-to-call to your web site, SFS lets you reach worldwide Skype users without running up your phone bill. It lets your prospects and customers Skype, the way they want to. And you get to keep your call center gear and software.
Skype for SIP builds with Skype’s current suppliers. Skype is one of the world’s largest buyers of PSTN termination and origination services. These suppliers connect Skype to public phone networks. In a very real sense, Skype is a middleman, a retailer buying PSTN at wholesale and selling it to individuals and companies. These same suppliers connect SkypeOut services for all of Skype. Because of this, there should be no issues with scaling Skype for SIP. There are a few barriers to Skype for SIP adoption. SkypeOut prices are not competitive in many markets. Small businesses don’t know how to configure phone switches for telecom services that aren’t built in to the switch. Small businesses only change phone services rarely, often when buying new hardware. The telecom VARs don’t know about Skype for SIP, Skype’s affiliate programs, or how to support their customers who want to buy or use Skype. What’s in it for Skype? Easy billable minutes. Skype can earn a small, growing share of the $billions companies pay to local, long distance, and international phone carriers. Skype could earn a share of the whole company’s spend before winning individual hearts and minds or getting Skype installed on company desktops and mobiles. More paid minutes means more buying power over Skype’s suppliers. This is a very high return on a very small Skype team. What will Skype learn? How to support and lead a channel. While not a new capability at Skype, Skype has never been strong in this area. Skype will accumulate a massive business call data record (CDR) database. They’ll be able to mine the data for behavior patterns to help them design new business products, uncover new ways to find future Skype customers, understand how company telecom departments shop and buy. What’s in Skype for SIP’s future? Potentially there will be free calls to other SFS customers; Skype doesn’t need to pay termination fees. Subscription plans for business, if they helps companies choose Skype. Tools to help telecom administrators manage SFS channel capacity ("You’re at capacity 94% this month. Add a channel?"). Skype for SIP will soon put $20 million per month in Skype’s hands. But this anonymous, hidden, back-door Skype product endangers Skype’s brand and the trust we have in it: Skype For SIP: Big Money, Skypeless, Brand Destroyer. tags: skype, skypeforsip, business, sip, voip, telecom, telephony, voice Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. See also on Skype Journal:
He’s in a wave. Adds a gadget. Passes a Skype name to a gadget. Browser-to-Skype call starts. They talk. As each person talks for a bit, their bit is encoded and linked-to. So you have a play-by-play record of a call. Inside a Google wave. Under the covers: Jason Goecke said "it is a Google Wave Gadget with his PhoneFromHere.com IAX2 Java softphone as the client. Then, the IAX2 Java phone connects to Asterisk with Skype for Asterisk installed. Then, there is a server-side element, Ibook, that is breaking apart utterances into individual files. So that as each person speaks, it captures it into its own file. Then, as that happens, a text frame is sent from Asterisk to the softphone with the file details. The gadget then uses some Javascript to embed a link. IAX2 supports text frames." This is cool (like I really had to tell you). First, it shows what it’s like to build Skype calls into other applications. Without a Skype client running. (Pardon my drooling.) Second, it deconstructs a long talk into directly referenceable snippets. (Still needs permalinks in addition to the playable links). This means you can annotate live calls with transcripts, pictures, etc. So the call’s Binary Large Object becomes binary tiny objects. Third, because the snippets are referred to by a wave, other gadgets and bots can enhance the archive. Add or remove background noise. Translate and provide voiceovers in your language. Highlight statistically improbable phrases. Detect stress in a voice. Visualize the data in a timeline or a relationship scorecard (who talked more?). Add tags to help you find this wave again. Fourth, no phone numbers were called in the making of this demo. Phone companies weren’t bothered. Internet all the way. Fifth, because this is within the context of a wave, it should be possible to use wave member data to lookup Skype names and bring people into an open conference room. Am I overstating it? tags: skype, asterisk, astricon, googlewave, wave, ibook, digium, phonefromhere, demo, video Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
[Links are mine.] Exhibits 1-20 to Declaration of S. Dargitz In Support of PI – PUBLIC, page six, redacted.
Discuss amongst yourselves. tags: skype, indexventures, skypeforsale, joost, litigation, lawsuit, preliminaryinjunction, injunction, dannyrimer, mikevolpi, volpi Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. Doc courtesy of Tara Swisher. Michael Arrington broke a rumor that Skype is in talks to buy Michael Robertson‘s Gizmo5. I don’t see much value. You buy a small company for five things: cash flow, IP, brand, relationships, and people. Does the firm produce cash flow? When you make half-a-penny a minute, you must sell a gazillion minutes. When you have intense competition, manage churn. When price-per-minute falls, find non-minute sources of revenue. When market prices fall, build volume for buying power over your termination suppliers. As of March 2009, "Gizmo5 serves more than six million consumer and business users" after six years. Skype adds that every 17 days. I don’t know if Gizmo5 has been successful enough to create attractive cash flow. If Skype owned the business, could Skype quickly build profits? Gizmo5′s IP prime asset could be its SIP gateway. They’ve built on top of it a SIP-to-Skype (OpenSky) gateway, support for Google Talk, and Gizmo Voice, a Gizmo5/Google Voice mashup. If the code is good enough, it might be the base of an enterprise server product or a hosted service. If you trust Julian Cain‘s critical fact-checking comments in Mike’s story, I doubt the code would survive due diligence. If the systems is rock solid, scalable, and easy to adapt, Skype might save two to six months development time by buying. The brand is fine for VoIP geeks, is known to buyers of cheap/free calling. However Gizmo is far from a broad consumer brand. Test for yourself. Gizmo5′s business relationships are available to Skype with a phone call. No exclusive channels of distribution. No high value marketing partners. No namespaces bringing millions of new Gizmo users. Which leaves the team. I have no idea if they have real depth of SIP talent, well integrated as a team. But it wouldn’t be hard for Skype to cherry pick the entire industry for the best SIP coders, architects, and production operations staff. Out of all of these, is there enough value that Skype might buy the company? Maybe. Robertson is a pirate in the entrepreneurial sense: he’s smart, flexible, opportunistic, and aggressive. He might add a healthy bloodthirst to Skype’s buttoned-down corporate/geek culture.
 How much should Skype pay for Gizmo5?
photo by J.D. Lasica. tags: skype, gizmoproject, gizmo5, michaelrobertson Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Rodrigue Ullens, Voxbone CEO, is scheduled to participate in a panel discussion of "HD Carrier Interconnection" at the HD Communications Summit today. I talked with Rod as he walked between meetings. [CORRECTION: iNum has not yet deployed Skype's SILK codec.] Skype Journal: You’re going to the HD Summit. What are you announcing? Rodrigue Ullens: We are announcing the iNum network now supports high definition voice calls. [See news release below the fold.] There don’t seem to be phone handsets that capture voice in high quality. How do you solve the garbage in, garbage out problem? Our only role is to play the middle man, pretty much. We expect, of course, to receive a voice call in high definition. For example, if today we were supporting the SILK codec. When you call an iNumber from Skype, we would receive the voice call from Skype with the quality that Skype hands it off. It depends of course on the handset and the phone that has transcoded the voice into a high def call. The only thing we do is convert from one codec to another and be the middleman helping networks talk to each other. We’ve talked about high def audio for years. Why now? Because I think it is the right opportunity in the sense that we see more and more networks that do support it. Maybe Skype has had it for a while but there are now other networks that are just coming up right now to support high definition. Same thing for some of the handsets, some of the phones. It’s just now getting some momentum. We want to be part of that momentum and enable different networks to talk to each other. To benefit from high definition it has to be end to end. You still have a lot of networks that support high definition but just in their island. I think we have another value to bring by having identifiers, item number that support high definition voice calls. And I think just now it’s starting to be interesting. Practically speaking, what is high definition or high quality? Technically, if you’ve been able to capture a higher frequency than the one from a traditional phone network. Where you sample eight thousand times per second with eight bits of data per sample; it gives you 64k of data uncompressed. A regular ISDN call. With high definition you sample more and capture a higher frequency of the voice so you have an impression of almost speaking right next to the person. The only codecs we’ve implemented in the network is the G722 codec. It’s the first one that’s available very easily, without royalty and so on. Now we’re working with Skype to implement SILK. With Skype, when I’ve made Skype calls and when the speakers are high def and when the person has a high def mic, you really hear the difference. For high def to become common and widespread, does the industry need to standardize on one or two codecs? I suppose that’s also part of the reason why Skype and everybody is now trying to make its codec the standard one. I don’t know who will win. I haven’t tested yet, but I have the impression that just like you can transcode from a regular codec to another one, you can transcode between high definition codecs. You will never have just one codec. That’s just the way it is; everybody wants to push their codec. That’s also why you will always need people facilitating communication between enterprises for a long time. Codecs will coexist for a long time. tags: skype, silk, codecs, inum, voxbone, codec, hidef, audio, sound, standards Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. The release:
Photo credit: Copyright 2009 James Duncan Davidson. asterisk | competition | hardware | ipevo | iPhone | iPodTouch | sip | Skype | skypeforbusiness | Yahoo Products: Skype for iPhone: Now Legally Available for Canadians. Congratulations, Canada! tip: type (flag:ca) in Skype chat. Skype For Asterisk "is available to download now from Digium for $66 USD per concurrent call or from Digium Authorized Resellers and Distributors worldwide, and comes with 90 days of installation support from the time of purchase." Skype For SIP channels are on sale for € 19.95 per month (without VAT – EUR) plus Skype’s standard per minute call rates (no country, global calling plans). ASUS Eee Reader could be built for Skype video calls, near the £100 mark. via Times Online. IPEVO TR-10i speakerphone is now $49.99. Value hat tip to Michael Rose. Business: Skype to run ads on CNN’s Connect the World show. Om interviews Brad Garlinghouse, formerly the Yahoo! exec who owned Yahoo! Messenger, lately an in-house advisor at Silver Lake Partners (soon to own 50%+ of Skype), and soon to be president of AOL’s email and AIM service. Interop with Skype is on the table. Mmmmm, peanut butter! Exabytes per month worldwide in our mobile broadband future. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. How much will be people lifestreaming video? Skype video multicasting? tags: skype, asterisk, iphone, canada, sip, asus, eee, ipevo, cnn, exabytes, bradgarlinghouse Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. Stefan Öberg spoke at Interop 2009 last month, as Jim Courtney reported and Öberg blogged. Two key takeaways. First, Skype plans to formalize and extend its premium (prioritized queue, private resources) online customer support for enterprises and to deliver local language, in-country customer support through channel partners. Last, Stefan said survey results show Skype is making its way into US and UK workplaces. The slides go by very fast, so here are screenshots on from the Stefan Öberg’s Skype for Business presentation at Interop 2009 flickr set. The comments below are mine.
hmmm. "The future of business communications" is a pretty big scope.
Not much new about the consumerization of IT. Been going on for generations. Mobile phones were smuggled in. Wi-Fi, Macs, even PCs were first brought to work by employees. Here’s a 2005 Gartner release saying "Consumerization Will Be Most Significant Trend Affecting IT During Next 10 Years."
Tough times call for desperate measures. Even "consumer grade" tools will do if they save lots of money.
We do have lots of connectivity, for now. Good enough for Skype video calls.
Not just by IT employees but by everyone. Darned employees, using strange software and connectivity in ways we didn’t plan.
We have one life, and we spend it at home, at school, and working. Our tools are becoming closer to us, less tied to or provided by our employers.
Presence will be matter when people stop lying about their availability. Skype’s presence service only lets you set one presence message for everyone. Yet you might be available to your best customer and not available for Bob from the accounting department. More stats…
Oh, and Skype Lite is coming out for the Blackberry this month.
Harder questions: What percent of smartphone users in the UK and US have ever downloaded an application? What percentage of smartphones sold in the US and UK will come with Skype preloaded?
Less integrated than bolted on or sitting next to your existing workflow. With a few limited exceptions, you cannot build Skype into an enterprise application. Unless you consider Outlook an enterprise workflow app.
Of the nine applications shown above, five were made by Skype, and three were made by one Skype developer. Not exactly a robust ecosystem.
The "tools" talking points are real accomplishments, although far from complete. Skype offers a version specifically for easy configuration (networking options and feature crippling) by IT. The readable admin guide to Skype has been useful in explaining how to make Skype installations conform to company security policies and assert control over users. Skype’s business control panel is a first stab at letting companies manage user accounts and distribute account funds.
"Enhanced service" as used here means customer service and technical support. Interoperability, well, Skype’s not there yet but it’s nice to hear executives acknowledge it as an opportunity. The closing slides say Skype is good wherever you work (office, travelling, at home).
Critique: A friend in the audience told me it was too salesy for the Interop IT crowd. Everyone there knew Skype already and they generally appreciate live demos more than PowerPoint. I tend to agree. The best parts of the talk were the hard numbers and the real world stories of companies putting Skype to work. Using real company names and showing photos or video of people using the tools at work would have been more meaningful. See also:
tags: skype, interop, interop2009, interop09, vegas, lasvegas, skypeforbusiness, business, enterprise, stats, statistics, trends, consumerization Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. Guest post by Jason Goecke, Adhearsion Today Skype announced Skype for SIP (SFS). Put simply, enterprise telephone systems may now interconnect with the This is a tremendous move by Skype and one I have contended for years was necessary for them to make headway in the enterprise. I applaud this step. There are plenty of great posts out there covering this already, including the one by @danyork on Disruptive Telephony. What does this mean for Skype for Asterisk (SFA) announced last September? At best the value of SFA has been significantly reduced by this announcement. Previously SIP interconnection to the Skype cloud was given to the rarified group of larger players such as Voxeo, Tellme, Genesys and others. SFA was the first time this access was going to be brought to the world of open source telephony developers through Asterisk. This provided an immense opportunity for the Asterisk developer community to create new applications to take advantage of this, which lead me to invest time to participate in the closed beta for SFA still underway. The SFS announcement this morning has just marginalized SFA to applications that benefit from direct dialing of Skype users from Asterisk and from basic presence updates from the Skype network. Gone are the benefits of providing Skype/SkypeIn inbound calls to the enterprise, SkypeOut trunking, etc. More so, SFA is at a disadvantage since you will have to pay a per channel (simultaneous call) license fee on top of any SkypeIn/SkypeOut costs. Further, I suspect that the number of SFA channels available to a single account will be limited for the same reason that SFS does not do SIP to Skype dialing, so that no one may provide large scale alternatives to SkypeIn. All of this has really taken the wind out of the SFA sails before it even had a chance to make it to a public beta. Digium must now look to quickly add new features. Such as advanced presence information, instant messaging, the SILK codec and others, if they hope to salvage their own investment in the development of SFA to date. While I understand these things take time, the lethargy of getting the SFA to market does not bode well for rapidly trumping the SFS announcement. Time will tell. tags: asterisk, ip-pbx, sfa, sfs, sip, skype, skypeforasterisk, skypeforsip, voiceoverip, VoIP, jasongoecke Call me at +1-510-455-4384, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. Ask for an invitation to the Skype Journal private roundtable. |
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