A cantankerous takeover and a reunion with founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have dominated talk of Skype in recent weeks, but internally the VoIP operator remains focused on achieving its previously announced strategic goals before the year draws to a close.

Enterprise business development manager Matthew Jordan told CommsDay the recent ownership change had little impact on the rank and file. “I can speak to my sphere of influence and my marching orders, and those have not changed,” Jordan said. “We are focused on bringing out Skype for SIP as quickly as possible, opening up that beta, getting business users to try it out and see how good they can have it. We’ll continue to offer the best Skype-native on the PC and mobility and other devices as they come out. It’s a little early to talk about what the goals of the new organization will be.”

Jordan said the new leadership had so far left Skype to its own devices. “With regards to what the overall strategy is for Skype, in 2009 the executive leadership team laid out a game plan where we’re gonna build upon the past success of our consumer application and the consumer market, and take those revenues we're able to realize through those users and reinvest it into three key areas,” he said.

“That would be three key areas - business, mobility and what we term the platform team, which is opening up Skype to a larger ecosystem of hardware and software manufacturers, like the ASUS videophone that runs Skype embedded on the device. With those three business units getting the lion's share of our efforts for new developments, and because Skype mobility definitely has a play in the business space, the business use of Skype is going to be more and more important to Skype overall over time.”

That includes the enterprise-grade Skype for SIP, which is slated to expand into an open beta next month following a limited deployment aimed at a handful of partners. “Any call center anywhere can make us of this right now and realize real dollar savings and enhanced productivity by enabling Skype connectivity into their legacy phone system,” Jordan said of the solution, noting that former parent eBay generated 11 million minutes of call center traffic monthly. Securing just 10% of that traffic would be a major win in billable minutes for a company that so far traffics mainly in free PC to PC calls, he explained.

“These enterprises are spending money, have already invested in their Ciscos and their Nortels and other PBXs that are SIP enabled, and by adding Skype for SIP to those systems they're basically opening these SIP-enabled systems up to the Skype ecosystem of 500+ million users.”

Jordan said the SIP model was proving more attractive to enterprises than the traditional Skype desktop model “because it's lower attack vector, less moving parts. Some of the stuff IT administrators may be worried about with regards to managing the Skype experience at the desktop level with the Skype client, they can take a standard approach where they roll out Skype for SIP into a controlled system - their PBX, which is tried and true and hardened. They know where Skype is running within their network and they gain a level of comfort.”

Once they get Skype for SIP up and running, many IT managers are coming back to Skype with a view towards rolling out unified communications via the Skype Business client, which Jordan described as “a really organic and healthy way for us to grow the unified communications footprint of Skype into the enterprise, by starting off with Skype-enabling their phone systems.”

Jordan declined to give Skype for SIP adoption numbers but said the operator had obtained interest all the way up to the Fortune 5 level. “It's a little too early to show the impact of Skype for SIP has had on our call volume. However, we are actively engaged with customers that are talking about passing us easily 1 million minutes per month per customer. These are big opportunities that folks are looking to Skype to fulfill,” he said, adding an estimated 35% of existing Skype customers were already using the VoIP platform for business use before Skype for Business formally launched last November. The company claims its Skype for SIP beta queue already numbers in the thousands. Those enterprises will be able to deploy the service from next month, when Skype rolls out a series of certified OEM devices and begins working on a final price model before a commercial launch early next year.

“We’ll really be able to rightsize the pricing model that we have, because the business user is so much different than the consumer in their calling patterns” explained Jordan. “When you introduce a PBX to a business user, that type of calling pattern is very different than the business user that makes us of the Skype client natively. So during the open beta period we'll be taking a look at the calling patterns of our thousands of users that are on beta at the time, and we'll be able to refine our strategy with regard to our pricing model on a monthly recurring, as well as our tariffs as well as any value-adds that a business may be able to realize.” That includes the possibility of a Skype federation of SIP-enabled users, allowing participating businesses to call one another at a discounted cost.

BUSINESS PARTNERSHIPS: Skype views partnerships as key to getting Skype for SIP widely embraced by the enterprise market, with Jordan acknowledging the company could stand to leverage more popular brands to win mindshare. “That is definitely where we're focusing our efforts for the remainder of 2009,” he told CommsDay. “With our announcements we've made with ShoreTel and Cisco and Nortel, with more to come, we think with a few partnerships with a handful of PBX manufacturers that are going to be interoperability certified for Skype for SIP, we'll have access to 50% or more of enterprise desktops.”

Those partnerships include PBX-to-Skype gateway manufacturers such as VoSKY. “We’re very happy with the partnership we have with them, and their customer base and their success. Whereas they were one of the few options in the past to tie a business phone system into the Skype ecosystem, now they may be more applicable for those PBXs that are not SIP-enabled, are not IP-enabled. If somebody has a small business and a key system that's 20 years old and they know that's going to work forever and is already off the books, they can get VoSKY and Skype-enable it very quick and easy,” Jordan said.

“But for those other business that know, trust and depend on partners like Cisco and ShoreTel and others, for these OEM manufacturers to help us with our message and get in front of these customers and say it is a viable, certified solution for an enterprise customer is really exciting and a key to our success,” he added. “There's several different ways the PBX manufacturers can benefit from this partnership, one being able to go to their customer base and say, 'Hey, I've got a new channel for you to open up to speak to a community of 500+ million Skype IDs. We have it certified, and we know the right people at Skype to talk to if you want to make it happen.' That definitely has helped us a great deal.”

Jordan said mobility was becoming increasingly important to enterprise customers, who have seen a sharp uptake of wireless VoIP accounts thanks to the Skype iPhone app and similar offerings. “Telecom managers and IT folks are looking to bring down the cost of mobility spend, as that number has been increasing both in the overall amount of spend as well as the percentage of telecom spend being spent on wireless. Skype for wireless applications is definitely seen as a nice fit, especially the same Skype subscriptions and IDs can be used on the mobile client as they can on the desktop, really driving the value of the subscription-based solutions for individuals.”

Jordan characterized the recession as a boon for Skype for Business as it forced IT managers look for ways to cut costs. “Whereas customers may have had budget for these large system installs - maybe it's an OCS or a Cisco UC or whatever it may be - now they're looking to bring down the cost but also add the functionality. The Ciscos and the Avayas all have benefits to the [unified communications] platforms that they offer, they're all enterprise grade, but there's cost and complexity with each of these systems. When you take a look at the cost and complexity of deploying Skype as maybe an overlay to a legacy 20-year-old PBX that will never be able to do video calling, then you've got a free calling client to download from wherever you can get to the Internet,” he said.

“Folks are all about saving money right now. Businesses are all about saving money - small, medium and enterprise. We have a solution that will help folks do that. We can prove it out with a free trial to show the quality is there, and once we've gotten past the quality and the learning curve that does take place with these users, we see rapid adoption at an institutional level.”

Patrick Neighly