Skype Announces Skype For Business

conq writes "Skype has launched a new offensive to go after small business dollars. From the BusinessWeek article: 'The company is unveiling Skype for Business, aimed at small companies with fewer than 10 employees, on Mar. 9. Skype for Business will include a new Web site, Skype.biz, as well as a host of features and hardware. While Skype has introduced features appealing to business users one by one for the past six months, the new announcement marks the beginning of a concerted effort.'"

Comments

Non Intel based businesses?

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

If a company uses Apple or AMD systems, does that mean they have to fire 5 employees?

No More Phones?

[DarkNemesis618]

I guess actual phones are becoming obsolete. There's something to be said though about the reliability of phone lines. Should the network go down, Skype would become useless. Most business networks are pretty reliable but still aren't perfect.

Re:No More Phones?

[XorNand]

It's more than just phones that's going to prevent adoption. Sure, there's a good amount of tech savvy businesses out there who would be willing to use something like this. However, there are 100x times as many businesses who would be saving a ton on their phone services if they could spell VoIP. Small business phone service is ungodly expensive. In many cases, they're spending more on their telecom services per month than they do rent. I've been working with a subscriber with a small, six-person office, with five phone lines and who makes a decent chunk of long distance calls. Their phone bill is over $600/mo! And they dropped $4k the phone system hardware four years ago.

The only way 95% of small businesses out there will ever adopt VoIP is if they are handheld through the process. Even if they know they'll save a ton of dough, working phones are just too critical to companies for them to throw caution to the wind. At the risk of giving away trade secrets ;-) that's the angle the VoIP company I work for is taking. We seek out partnerships with independant computer techies, VARs, and consultants who have small businesses as clients. These are the people that have the ear of business owners when it comes to making technology decisions. In return, we pay the partner a monthly stipend/retainer to support the subscriber. Businesses are *much* more likley to adopt something like this if they know they have a local expert that they contact in case of problems.

While Skype is cool and can save them ton a cash what's even more important to businesses is a level of trust. I don't know a business owner in their right mind who would put their phone service in eBay's (the owner of Skype) hands. Their level of customer service is worse than Verizon.

Congratulations, Skype!

[Jugalator]

I believe you're the first non-spammer to use a .biz domain!
There should be an award for these things to improve .biz adoption. ;-)

Re:Skype for Linux

[ajs318]

And while we're at it, the source code would be nice.

Failing that, just use a commonly-available hardware SIP phone which will work with the Asterisk software PABX.

Skype didn't work for us

[silverbax]

We signed up with Skype to test it out - it took WEEKS to get set up, although our payment cleared immediately. We never recieved real response in the way of customer service, so we moved to NetZero's VOIP - it was set up within minutes, has always worked and calls anywhere.

Skype = Hype.

Re:Skype didn't work for us

[moniker_21]

I had that exact same problem. Well, almost exactly the same. It took about 24 hours and a strongly worded email from me to get my account acvitated, even though my payment had cleared already. They told me they are having intermitent problems with their payment system wherein some accounts take longer to be activated then others. It was a frusterating start, but once I did get setup I've found Skype to be pretty awesome.

Re:So what will the big phone companies do now?

[oirtemed]

That is one theory. The other theory involves lobbying and new laws.

Re:With VOIP becoming more attarctive by the day..

[ajs318]

Encrypted VOIP will be damn nigh impossible to tax or regulate. Encrypted traffic is just encrypted data; and there is no way to know what it is without decrypting it. Which, depending on the encryption algorithm, may well take a long, long time and is not even certain to produce anything useful {since any given cyphertext could be the result of any one of a large number of plaintext/key pairs}.

Skype is reckoned to be encrypted, but this claim cannot be verified, as the source code is not available for perusal; it must be assumed that at least Skype themselves, and possibly The Authorities, have the power to listen to Skype calls.

SIP or IAX over SSL/TLS would be much more secure, since these are open protocols and the only secret is the encryption key.

Skype can be turned into a botnet ...

[tonk]

... is what some smart people demonstrated at BlackHat Europe: Silver Needle in the Skype

Stiff competition

[grasshoppa]

They have some stiff competition from Asterisk, which is just starting to gain some serious momentum.

Would you rather have;

1) A completely open system, based on commodity hardware

or

2) Locked in system?

Most people I talk with love asterisk BECAUSE it's based on standards. These are business owners I'm talking about. They dislike avaya's and co attempts to lock them in, and appreciate asterisk's openness.

Well, that, and asterisk can do *ANYTHING*.

Add in the fact they setup arbitrary limitations, and I don't think they are taking the business sector seriously.