Skype for Business too risky?

26.10.2009
If you're thinking about using as a way to save money you might want to put it off until the courts settle lawsuits that swirl around plans to sell the company.

That's the advice of Irwin Lazaar, an analyst with Nemertes Research, who otherwise regards the company's enterprise offering, Skype for Business, as a viable way to save on long-distance calls. "Skype's future is very much in doubt," he says. "I would wait at least six months or a year for the legal wranglings to work themselves out."

Skype's founders want to buy it back from eBay and have filed lawsuits that could jeopardize use of essential code that the founders still own. Without the code, the risk of Skype for Business being disrupted is serious enough that customers should beware relying on it, Lazar says.

Legal uncertainties aside, Lazar says Skype for Business is a significant opportunity to reduce long-distance costs. Any of Skype's 16 million users can call a Skype-enabled business and customers for free, helping to control costs for contact centers or remote corporate employees, he says. The service can also complete calls to non-Skype numbers using the Internet as a long-distance backbone and then dropping calls off at local public phone exchanges for completion.

A range of VoIP and IP video vendors support Skype, making it simpler for their customers to integrate Skype with the vendors' commercial offerings. These include Cisco, , SIP Foundry (part of Nortel) and LifeSize, and there are talks with Alcatel-Lucent and Microsoft, says Stefan Oberg, general manager and vice president of Skype for Businesss. Since LifeSize is a telepresence vendor, this relationship suggests future video integration with Skype.