Skype Now Means Business, Friends the SIP World
Skype, a division of beleaguered eBay, is going corporate. The company today announced that it will play nice with corporate PBX systems that use Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). According to The Wall Street Journal …
Context & Ripple Effects
Skype’s relevance to the workplace had already been examined in the emerging new-workspace market, while eBay’s stewardship faced questions, including consideration of a Skype sale. The company also said nearly one-third of registered subscribers used Skype for business purposes.
By opening interoperability with SIP-based PBX systems, Skype is addressing a constraint on that business use: companies can connect the service to communications infrastructure they already operate rather than treat it solely as a separate consumer application.
First-order effects
- Corporate PBX operators using SIP gain a path to connect Skype calling with their existing phone environments.
- Skype broadens its enterprise proposition from standalone software to an interoperable communications component.
Second-order effects
- PBX vendors and corporate telephony providers face pressure to make their own systems easier to integrate with internet-calling services as Skype enters the same deployment decisions.
- Business users can evaluate Skype alongside, rather than apart from, established office telephony, shifting the comparison toward integration and call experience.
Third-order effects
- If SIP interoperability becomes a standard route into corporate accounts, the boundary between consumer internet calling and enterprise telephony will weaken, with open interfaces becoming a competitive control point.
The trend: Internet calling providers are pursuing enterprise adoption through interoperability with incumbent communications systems rather than requiring companies to replace them outright.