Two Deals Show Skype's Relevance In New Work Space
Last week's Skype blackout and the impact it had on millions brought home the fact that the little P2P voice service has become an important member of modern communications. Two new, discrete bits of news add further weight to that theory.
Context & Ripple Effects
Skype spent the past week proving both halves of its story. On August 16, 2007, its peer-to-peer network buckled under a mass global restart of client machines, knocking out sign-ons for millions before service was fully restored days later — a fragility question the corpus first raised in November 2005 with Dark Clouds over Skype?, and one that sits awkwardly beside the federation opportunity Skype Journal laid out in July 2006 in its call for IM federation leadership.
Now, barely a week after recovery, GigaOM reads two fresh acquisitions — one of them IBM's purchase of a web conferencing vendor, picked up by PC World — as evidence that Skype has become infrastructure for what it calls the new work space. A mainstream outlet carrying the story within a day shows how far the argument travelled beyond VoIP trade circles.
First-order effects
- IBM's move into web conferencing puts an enterprise heavyweight directly next to Skype's installed calling base, giving the consumer-born service a corporate distribution path it never built itself.
- Full restoration of sign-on after the August 16 collapse hands millions of users back their service, but leaves enterprise buyers weighing Skype's reach against its demonstrated single-network fragility.
Second-order effects
- Rival conferencing and collaboration vendors must now respond to a market where an incumbent buyer has validated P2P voice as part of the work stack, forcing build-or-partner decisions rather than dismissal.
- The blackout's scale turns reliability into a competitive variable: any vendor courting the same business users can now point to a real outage of millions-user magnitude when pitching managed alternatives.
Third-order effects
- If consumer P2P voice keeps merging into enterprise suites, the line between carrier telephony and software-delivered communication erodes into platform competition for the workplace.
- Repeated large-scale dependency on one peer-to-peer network points toward federated and redundant communication architectures — the direction the 2006 federation debate already anticipated — becoming a procurement requirement rather than an engineering preference.
The trend: Consumer peer-to-peer voice is being absorbed into enterprise work-space platforms, with high-profile outages setting the pace at which businesses trust it.