For once, I can agree with Microsoft. Skype has no place in a business, not only because of its underlying peer-to-peer technology which will user your company’s CPU power and network infrastructure to create a network for people outside of the enterprise, but also because of Skype’s contact list being linked to your, or your employee’s Skype ID.

While Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group agreed that Skype’s call quality is fine, he warned businesses that employees could take their contacts with them when they left for a competitor. While this remains possible without using Skype, the software makes it very easily and employees make take their contact lists with them unintentionally.

With regards to Skype’s global outage this week and the company’s subsequent blame on Microsoft’s update service, Pall said: “I’m not saying there are no problems, I’m saying … we need to fix those problems and deal with them”. But Mark Main, senior analyst with Ovum remarks: “They [Skype] will get away with this one or maybe even twice but if it becomes a succession of events, then people will say it’s not for me”.

Ian Fogg, senior analyst with Jupiter Research, said Skype needs to act quickly to regain customer trust. “Peer-to-peer VOIP companies like Skype need to take another look at their engineering resources and slightly take the foot off the pedal and make sure that what they do is reliable,” he said.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 01:46 CEST and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.