The free internet telephony service Skype has moved from
being a consumer play into the business arena. So what canit offer
you and how is it best implemented?
According to Andrea Wilson, operations director of Dublin-based
software consultancy Exoftware, two recent developments have
enabled the company to dramatically cut the cost of doing business:
low-cost air travel and Skype, the free internet telephony
service.
"Skype is one of the best things to hit businesses in recent
years. We are seeing significant savings in telephone costs by
using Skype, which we use for internal meetings, sales calls and
for conference calls with other companies. Nearly all our calls are
made over Skype now," Wilson said.
In fact, the company usually ensures new employees set up a
Skype account if they do not have one already.
The reasons for that are clear: internal calls using Skype are
free, as are calls made to other Skype users around the world.
Other calls incur minimal charges: making an outbound call to
non-Skype clients in Europe, for example, costs just £0.012 per
minute.
For Exoftware, that also helps to control the call costs of
employees working from home, as well as those on business trips,
who previously relied on costly mobile calls to stay in touch.
Also, combining Skype with simple webcams has given Exoftware
employees access to low-cost, easy-to-use video conferencing
facilities, said Wilson.
This enthusiasm for Skype is reflected widely across a broad
range of industries and company sizes. At one end of the spectrum
is The Dream PA, Nadine Hill's one-woman outfit. She has deployed
Skype so her clients can brief her on jobs.
At the other end is recruitment giant Manpower. "Skype obviously
has benefits, otherwise we would not be using it," said Kevin
Fitzpatrick, the company's chief technology officer. "We see great
value in being able to communicate with external partners and
development groups in other countries at low cost."
In fact, said Bruce Everest, senior consultant at telecoms group
Avaya, any company that does not think its employees are using
Skype to make calls is probably fooling itself.
"Skype calls are being made in almost every client site I go
into, whether the client knows it or not," he said.
This is causing an inevitable backlash among the enterprise
voice over IP (VoIP) companies, which argue that Skype is
inherently a consumer service and ill-equipped to meet the demands
of businesses.
Of particular concern with Skype is service quality, said
Everest. "When voice over the public internet works, it is great,
but when it is bad, it is appalling, and business users will not
tolerate poor voice services when they are conducting important
company business."
Nor does Skype offer companies business-level VoIP
functionality, said Graham Walsh, VoIP specialist at business
telephony group Telinet. "Skype simply does not have the functions
that one takes for granted in a business, such as a switchboard,
the ability to transfer calls between phones and the ability to
forward calls to other devices."
And in IT management terms, it poses real problems, said David
Thorn, chief executive of telecoms provider Telstra Europe. "Unlike
Skype, business-level solutions come complete with network
monitoring tools, which provide IT diagnostics and analyse and
monitor usage, enabling the IT manager to make decisions about
their network and the quality of service that is being
provided.
"Obviously, there is a danger that, with a solution such as
Skype, the IT manager will be in the dark about usage, without
visibility of how the service is being used or its impact on other
business services."
But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the quality of
service offered by Skype is largely meeting business users'
expectations - or at least is not a serious impediment to offseting
the cost benefits offered by the service.
And at most larger companies where frequent Skype calls are
made, the service is being used as an add-on to existing telephony
services, not replacing them.
Perhaps a more worrying issue is the claim made by industry
analysts that companies using Skype are exposed to a host of undue
network security risks that could seriously impact their
businesses.
In November 2005, for example, Canadian IT analyst company
Info-Tech Research Group called for businesses to ban Skype - or at
least take steps to ensure it is policed and secured - in a
research note provocatively entitled, "Five reasons to ban
Skype".
These reasons include Skype's ability to bypass corporate
firewalls; basic technical vulnerabilities which Info-Tech claims
leave companies open to hacker attacks despite Skype encryption;
and the burden of tracking and storing all user communications with
the software.
If IT managers want to allow Skype in the workplace, said
InfoTech analyst Ross Armstrong, they should at least develop and
enforce policies on acceptable usage, such as refusing file
transfers, and warn against using it for sensitive
communications.
That process is already underway at Manpower, said Fitzpatrick.
"We need to ensure that our wireless area network is not adversely
impacted by Skype traffic, so we are completing a roll-out of
analysis tools and processes that will enable us to monitor
bandwidth usage across all of our 4,000 sites globally," he
said.
But according to Richard Edwards, an analyst with UK-based
analyst company, the Butler Group, Info-Tech's warning overlooks
another important point: the risk that corporate computers will be
commandeered by Skype to act as super nodes.
Because Skype has very few physical assets as a company, it
relies on the power of third-party devices connected to the
internet to route Skype traffic. Indeed, signing off on the Skype
client software licence agreement gives the company tacit
permission to do this.
"Any computer running Skype with clear line-of-sight to the
internet, plenty of bandwidth and plenty of resources [such as
memory and CPU] has the potential to become a super node, and this
could result in this machine - and potentially the network segment
it is attached to - becoming overwhelmed by Skype traffic."
That threat is somewhat overplayed, said Skype executives. Skype
chooses powerful computers with clear access to the internet - so
corporate PCs would be unlikely to be affected - and, in any case,
it uses only a tiny percentage of CPU and bandwidth resources.
According to Skype, the selection algorithms are designed to
keep usage of super node resources at an acceptable level, so even
if a corporate machine was selected, it is unlikely any change in
performance would be noticed.
Not only that, said Skype's vice-president of marketing Saul
Klein, but Skype is doing its best to educate network
administrators on the best ways to securely manage Skype traffic
across corporate networks.
"We encourage business users to visit
www.skype.com/security,
where there is a variety of resources available for download," he
said.
"These provide guidance on the best ways to police and control
Skype traffic on corporate networks, but I should add that we have
never had any complaint from any business user about any of these
issues."
There is a growing awareness at Skype of the importance of
business customers, said Klein. "We put a lot of time into
surveying customers last year and one thing that came up was that
approximately 25% of our 61 million registered users rely on Skype
for business purposes."
In October 2005 the company launched the Skype Group service,
which enables a single administrator to buy and distribute Skype
credits to multiple Skype accounts as well as buy Skypein and Skype
Voicemail premium services for group members.
Skypein enables callers on regular phones to call Skype numbers
and has proved very popular with business users, said Klein.
"Using Skypein, a business user working in a company's London
head office can set up a Swedish Skypein number so that Swedish
co-workers and customers can call in from the regular phone network
at the local [Swedish] rate," he said.
Up to 10 Skypein numbers can be associated with a single Skype
name, he added, and the company's research found that about 30% of
Skype Group users now put their Skype name and a Skypein number on
their business card.
The future of Skype - the analyst's verdict
Skype has acquired over 50 million registered users since it
appeared in 2002, and with over three million users online at any
given time, it is fast becoming the intercom of the internet.
Available in 27 languages on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and
Pocket PC operating systems, Skype is an easily installed and easy
to use internet telephony application that allows its users to
communicate across the internet for free.
Skype's value-added services - Skypeout, Skypein, and Skype
Voicemail - provide the company with a small but growing revenue
stream, and enable users to call regular fixed-line and mobile
phones at discounted rates.
In these days of standards and interoperability it is
interesting to note that Skype favours its own protocols above
established standards, such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
and eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)
Therefore we might see the likes of Google, MSN, AOL, and Yahoo
having to re-engineer their own communication tools in order to
interoperate with the growing Skype user base.
Internet telephony may still be in its infancy, but the £1.5bn
acquisition of Skype by eBay last year will now fuel its growth as
the network effect takes hold.
The acquisition will also enable eBay and Skype to pursue
entirely new lines of business, so interesting times are
undoubtedly ahead.
Partnering technology with Skype
For every company that argues Skype is a consumer technology and
should stay that way, another is betting that Skype's foothold in
the enterprise market is likely to grow.
For example, in January 2006, hosted customer relationship
management (CRM) company Salesforce.com announced it was
integrating Skype capabilities within its Appexchange service.
By combining the two companies' technologies, Skype for
Appexchange embeds communications features directly into
Salesforce.com applications. So when a sales person receives a
Skype call from a customer, that customer's contact details and
purchase history will appear on screen.
Alternatively, when viewing a customer's records, sales staff
can make a "one-click" call to that customer using Skype. Skype
also enables staff to identify when a customer is online to receive
their call.
Another company looking to capitalise on corporate usage of
Skype is Packeteer, a supplier of technology that enables IT
managers to monitor, control and accelerate application performance
over Wans and the internet.
The company's chief technical architect, Mike Morford, said the
company had seen a large increase in Skype traffic over corporate
networks in the past year, and in late 2005 launched an updated
plug-in for its Packetwise product that helps IT managers identify
Skype traffic.
Customers for this product fall into two categories, said
Morford. "There are those that wish to protect Skype traffic
because they see Skype as a valuable and cost-effective tool for
communicating with customers and partners, and there are those,
particularly in heavily regulated industries, that wish to stop
Skype traffic altogether, because compliance concerns mean that all
inbound and outbound calls need to be logged through the PBX." -
Richard Edwards, senior research analyst, Butler Group