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Skype is rumored to be in trials of its business focused Skype Connect service with two Avaya customers and next week at Enterprise Connect there will likely be some noise made by the global telco minutes stealer of an expanded relationship with Avaya.
Skype is also hot on the trail to get more enterprise customers onto their Skype/SIP hybrid platform, as evidenced by the push they’ll be making in Orlando. My guess is that soon there will be more companies in the trials and that by Q3 of this year a full roll-out will be underway.
But that’s only half of what Skype is up to. Their real goal is to monitize more of the traffic and audience they are touching.
Let’s face it, Skype has been about cheaper minutes, and free communications, but management their now realizes that the future is in expensive services. Last year at eComm I sat down with the father of SIP, Jonathan Rosenberg, who now guides Skype vision and strategy. During that chat Rosenberg talked all about apps, services and the web and not the cloud. Since then he and a few key Skypers, most notably Jason Fischl, ex CounterPath CTO, have been busily mapping out and building Skype’s web based attack on services, figuring out what to deliver and how to deliver it all..
When you combine web based services with Skype’s Enterprise play, that’s where the money gets made, but that’s not exactly happening today, but with Rosenberg and Company working feverishly in the direction of it, there will be money making services that are lightyears ahead of what the legacy telcos are doing today. Watch for the signs next week in Orlando.
