Skype plays the business card

Introduction of Skype for SIP is likely to rattle a lot of pure-SIP providers, but it is Skype's march to ubiquity across the consumer and business fields that bears watching.

To borrow a cliché, Skype is the Apple of the VoIP world.  It talks a good game about playing well with others when it suits its business goals, has a lot of proprietary/closed box technology that it doesn't want people looking at too closely, and makes a lot of PR noise relative to the rest of the unwashed masses.

Apple has made several runs at the business world with mixed results. I expect the same with Skype's efforts. Like Apple, Skype has to build a business story and its story is shaping up to be 1) Having more than 400 million (and counting) registered users and 2) Use us, save money. Like Apple, Skype is in the process of tuning a targeted message for businesses; warm fuzzy colors on the Skype for Business site are out, toned down professional ones are in.

Will Skype end up replacing the need for a standard SIP trunk? Not today, not tomorrow.  First, Skype has to get businesses into the idea that being able to allow customers to call in via Skype is a good thing.  It also has to qualify a bunch of third-parties as "Skype Certified" and that won't be something that happens overnight.

On the other side of the coin, Skype has a good brand and near-instant name recognition, two attributes which a lot of business VoIP providers would love to have. There's also the power of Skype's global reach - one that could prove enticing to many small businesses that thrive on international projects.

Finally, Skype has another attribute that tends to get unrecognized among all of its press releases: steady, methodical persistence. In this, it is more like Microsoft than Apple.  Skype for Asterisk was the warm-up round, Skype for SIP is the first hand using real money, and there are a lot of hands still to play over the months ahead.  Skype has already hinted it has a bigger/better UC card to play down the road and I wouldn't be surprised for it to put down a bigger business video card down by the end of the year; certified interoperability with Polycom and TANDBERG might be an interesting card to be played.

- Doug