Skype’s new revenue plan, Enterprise Telephony

Skype is finally moving into a market segment where the actual money is, and that is Business Telephony. Lately it has been playing very nice with most of the Enterprise Telephony service providers. “Skype for SIP” offering already interops with Shoretel. According to Om , Skype is likely to announce tomorrow that the Skype for SIP offering will interop with Cisco Systems Unified communication 500 systems. This is a big leap forward. It’s and interesting combination. Cisco being the leader in Business telephony and Skype, the undisputed leader in PC based consumer telephony. The journey for Skype doesn’t end here, they are also working with another major player in enterprise telephony, Avaya communications. Avaya recently bought nortel's enterprise division.

Hopefully moving closer towards standard protocol like SIP will help them mitigate the dependency on P2P protocol, and come out of the legal issues they are facing with Joldid. I guess it may take a while before they can build a workaround for P2P.

The recent moves from skype other than the legal issues are quite promising and looks like they are on the right track after the recent buyout from private investors