Internet telephony and chat service provider Skype, owned by eBay, today announced a potentially game-changing move, opening up to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard for its VoIP services. As evidenced by the discussion going on at Techmeme, the beta program being rolled out by the company marks a clear initiative to target enterprise customers and open up to new revenue streams.
According to the Wall Steet Journal, the new beta software – uncreatively named Skype For SIP for Business users – is expected to allow employees to make domestic and international calls using regular office telephones (PBX systems) instead of using a computer and a headset for VoIP calls, which 35% of Skype’s customers are already using for business purposes apparently. The software will also give corporate customers the ability to receive and manage inbound calls from Skype users to SIP-enabled PBX systems, enabling them to offer click-to-call functionality on websites.
Pricing hasn’t been announced yet in beta stage, but in the meantime standard rates will apply. That translates to about 2.1 cents per minute for calls to cellphones and fixed lines, and free for calls from computers to phone systems.
In other news, Skype is thinking of making its image and logo more business-friendly, meaning more boring, and for some reason it’s pitching the horrible domain name Skype.biz for its corporate solution website.
Many commentators are signaling this as a move to generate more revenue from corporate customers, with eBay looking over its shoulder, reportedly looking to offload the property if its financials start looking a bit more impressive than they do now. The company raked in $550 million in revenue last year.
What do you think of the move, and whether eBay should be considering a sale of Skype?
That’s a great news for Skype Fans…
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Wonder if anyone will get this up and running on an iPhone via Fring.
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İs there will be any differences according to countries? For example we are in Turkey.
This is definitely a cool feature and evolution for Skype. It will be interesting to see what the adoption rate is and what size companies will jump on board. Price is definitely attractive as long as the quality is up to par.
Looks to be a gr8 News for Skype business users..
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Will voice quality improve significantly for enterprise customers? We have tried to have skype conference calls at the publishing firm where I work with our partners in UK and Italy, but we gave it up after a few tries. The call quality just was not there … although to be fair, I don’t know if that was sype’s fault or the fault of our respective broadband connections.
In any case, I would imagine skype will have to guarantee much greater voice quality for paying customers.
We use Skype (beta mac version) for our conference and screen sharing calls with clients in Italy and India with no problems at all; so I would have to guess it’s you.
Skype, eBay, and Paypal don’t have an enterprise sales team. They depend on VARs to bring them into enterprises. Long cycle to success with this venture.
Hmmm…. Things are finally evolving now that Google has entered the VoIp game with Google Voice… I wonder if they are releasing this beta now to offset a little bit the buzz around Voice? Good news anyway, it was time Skype offered a business model that is more suitable to business users and easier to integrate with their existing business habits…
How does this work? Using existing PBX in an enterprise? How do you bridge SIP if the PBX does not support SIP protocol. Can anyone care to explain?
If your PBX doesn’t support SIP then you’re mostly out of luck.
If you want to keep your non-SIP PBX you could always bolt on an open-source PBX (FreeSWITCH or Asterisk) through a T1 card though. I’ve seen plenty of places add features to their legacy PBX this way without having to disturb their original, stable system.
Simple you take the ISDN lines from your phone system and add a VOIP gateway.
This allows you to convert the SIP call into a PSTN call.
This technology has been around for years in the SIP world.
eBay should sell Skype because it never figured out what to do with it and Google should buy Skype because it’ll show everyone how to create lots of value with it.
Skype rocks and this is way over due. I think eBay should think long and hard before selling skype. yeah its not core but will pay didvidends in the end.
They should think 5-10 years dwon the line about where skype will really be.
About time Skype got real SIP is critical to its biz IMO
This is 5+ years overdue. Skype should have been the Global VOIP back-bone. Instead, every provider had to cobble together its own network. And it’s insane that Skype never pursued paying business customers.
Back in 2004 I wrote a post relating to the VON Canada Panel I sat on with Niklas Zennstrom. It was an interesting debate on open standards (SIP in this care) and closed networks, specifically Skype. I was quite vocal about how silly I thought Skype was not to include SIP.
Good to see the new mgt is have a positive impact!
It looks like they may have hired the CTO away from SIP softphone giant Counterpath?
http://sipthat....its-about-time/
time to buy eBay stock . . . this is a game changer . . . .
I think it is a step in the right direction (as it is towards SIP). But it is important to remember this is a STEP towards a pretty huge huge goal, which is going to take a lot of work.
Also, it is a closed by invitation only beta. My concern is that beta doesn’t always roll out to a full release and then on top of that Skype was hesitant to do this in the past – a year ago they said their customers weren’t asking for interconnects?!?!
http://www.incb...ering-skype-sip
Sounds like the sane things to have been undertaken in 2004/5.
Good move skype.
SG
It sure would help Skype get into the SME market.
But given the non-technical nature of startups, there is a still a connector required to get the best of both Skype and SIP worlds.