Some businesses are using consumer Skype clients for business purposes even before the service Skype for Business becomes generally available by year-end.

Maxim Integrated Products, an analog computer-chip maker based in Sunnyvale, Calif., says it saved $90,000 over the past year with an informal Skype program. The company bought Skype's all-you-can-use outbound calling to the United States and Canada for $30 per user per year for 2,000 users. The company installed a Skype client on each PC and issued a headset or USB handsets to the users, says Walter Curd, Maxim's CIO. They don't have to use it, but those who did saved the company $150,000 in long-distance fees in one year, a net savings of $90,000, he says.

Only 20% of the users use Skype heavily, he says, and about 20% don't use it at all, with the rest using it sometimes. Most use it for talking with fellow employees at other company sites, he says.

Maxim beefed up the bandwidth on some of its Internet connections to insure they didn't affect Skype call quality, he says, but because of lower pricing, that didn't increase the cost to Maxim. "The problem with Skype is the quality of the internal network, not the quality of the Internet," he says.

Maxim's primary phone system is made up of traditional Nortel PBXs, with Skype being used as a supplement that adds desktop video and instant messaging to the communications mix, Curd says. The company already uses Polycom teleconferencing gear, but it requires scheduling rooms in order to use it. "I can never get the room for conferencing with my direct reports," he says. So he issued them desktop Web cameras and videoconferences over Skype instead.