Over the past couple of years I have attended quarterly briefings given by CheckPoint Canada that give me some perspective on Internet security issues from a third party (relative to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Skype, etc.) who understands not only the issues that challenge a business’s Internet security but also how they are changing over time. I’m more interested in the security issues overview and what business issues need to be considered and addressed, not the technology details. (I’ll trust CheckPoint’s sales results to be the guide as to their credibility.) CheckPoint Canada’s presentations are quite educational in this respect, in part due to the knowledge and passion of their lead technical resource for Canada.

At the most recent presentation two weeks ago I learned (i) about the evolution of CheckPoint’s new approach to addressing security at the enterprise level and (ii) about an experience that demonstrated one simple example of CheckPoint’s thoroughness at identifying and addressing Internet security issues at a personal engagement level.

In taking a new approach there are several changes in the business environment that challenge the ability of simple solutions such as firewalls and IP address identification to manage security, including intrusions such as malware and business data loss.

• Users have more than one device: a PC, a smartphone, maybe even a tablet.
• Employees need to be able to carry on personal activities, such as banking, from their place of employment
• this creates data privacy issues
• IP address-based policies no longer work – users no longer belong to one network.
• The emerging IPv6 standard means that it will become very difficult to track activity via a “single” IP address; also the IPv6 protocol is not a simple extension of IPv4’s nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn format.
• Security policies need to synchronize with a customer’s internal business processes as the priority.
• Use of collaboration tools and services is on the rise; not everyone is at one “secure” location.
• Security needs to address permission issues involving both websites and applications
• 189 new websites were created every minute in 2010
• The rise of video use for, say, marketing and support create bandwidth issues

Yet businesses obviously continue to seek protection against security breaches and data loss at minimal overhead and costs to the operation.

CheckPoint addresses these issues with a focus on the business’s policies, people (employees and contractors who need access) and enforcement as opposed to the underlying technology infrastructure. This is reflected in their unique ability to configure their installations to meet a business’s needs. In its infrastructure CheckPoint maintains a dynamically updated database of critical data.

In part CheckPoint addresses these issues through engagement of users as they attempt to visit a website or use an application:

• For instance, when accessing Facebook, a notification comes to the user advising of company policy and a warning about the information that cannot be shared on Facebook.
• Exceptions can be established to permit access to, say, an online banking site without inspecting data.
• All traffic is inspected to ensure SSL certification where appropriate.

One issue CheckPoint addresses is data loss prevention, both internally and externally. Here is one example of how CheckPoint has a significantly complete offering that provides a warning to the individual employee’s activity.

CheckPoint Canada’s Regional Security Engineering Manager was recently checking out one of Checkpoint’s new data loss prevention (“DLP”) tools on his home network (no, they do not have a home product, yet). He attempted to check into an Air Canada flight via the Air Canada application on his iPhone. But the DLP software identified an issue:

His personal information data – including his Aeroplan number – was going across the Internet to Air Canada as unencrypted clear text. Apparently doing an Air Canada check-in via their website is encrypted; however, until Air Canada addresses this issue for their iPhone application (they have been notified), Kellman will not be doing check-ins via his iPhone (and probably the same applies to their BlackBerry application).

Bottom Line: What I can say from the presentation is that CheckPoint has developed not only the technology expertise but also the business experience that addresses they dynamic nature of the Internet, its growth, its usage and its security threats while ensuring that individual users can be comfortable with their work and personal activities. As with business use of social media, engagement of the individual user is a key to their ongoing success. (And their recent sales growth is the best indicator of that success.)

One final comment: CheckPoint employees are heavy users of Skype and, in fact, CheckPoint has no qualms about allowing usage; in the case below, the CheckPoint customer is giving permission for its sales department to use Skype. I’ll have more to say in another post about Kellman’s use of Skype to keep in touch with his young family while having a heavy travel schedule across Canada and to CheckPoint’s headquarters in Israel.

Over the past six years of covering Skype, there have been three “Masters” – the original founders – Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (2003 to 2005), eBay (2005 to 2009) and the Silver Lake consortium (2009 to MS acquisition). And, once regulatory approvals and due diligence are completed, Microsoft will become the fourth later this fall.

But we’ve never heard the full background to some of these transitions. We knew there had been a major intellectual property issue – “you can’t drive the car without the engine”; we heard presentations on the Skype business model as Skype was presented to the investment community by eBay. But what happened behind the scenes that resulted in the many business decisions made to justify these ownership changes has never come out as one complete story.

At this past week’s Fortune Brainstorm Tech event in Aspen, a most interesting panel discussion revealed some of the history and reasoning behind this evolution, starting with, on John Donahue’s assumption of the eBay CEO position in 2009, eBay’s decision to “carve out” Skype as a non-core asset. On the Fortune event panel were three key players in this evolution: Skype CEO Tony Bates, Silver Lake Managing Director Egon Durban and Andreesson Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz.

It’s most interesting to watch the entire video but some highlights:

• Dealing with the dichotomy of a “wildly popular and deeply troubled” company that was in full blown litigation with its founders.
• How Skype continues to operate as an independent company and its sole responsibility to Microsoft during the due diligence period leading up to the closing of the Microsoft acquisition, expected in October, 2011
• Why Silver Lake, working with Andreesson-Horowitz, was able to execute on the two steps necessary to acquire Skype, in the process rescuing a “terrific asset that continued to perform, [had] fantastic network effects and continued to produce great product” from a “horrible cataclysmic outcome”. But seeing Skype as “resilient notwithstanding”, these investors recognized a unique opportunity that required a unique solution.
  • Yet they came up with a solution that would eventually give eBay investors a net gain on their initial 2005 investment in Skype.
• The internal Skype business issues that the Silver Lake consortium recognized and why they hired Tony Bates out of a senior executive position at Cisco to take over the reins.
  • In the course of this there is a lesson on how a private equity takeover can be highly successful and grow a business built around existing key resources. It’s a stark contrast to the more often publicized “slash-and-burn” approach of many private equity acquisitions where employee and product cuts become the recipe for repackaging a business investment for a subsequent sale.
  • There are some interesting comments mentioning one additional key asset, beyond the technology and user base, that made the Skype acquisition a “magical opportunity” when Microsoft was considering the acquisition last spring.
• What Tony Bates has done behind the scenes that has resulted in the release of five new products over the past six weeks¹– more than had been released in the previous two years.
  • What Tony Bates sees as a bigger revenue opportunity than SkypeOut calling.
• How the pending Microsoft acquisition of Skype will result in an entirely new business model for how Microsoft embeds an acquisition into it overall operations.

Bottom line: starting with the Silver Lake consortium acquisition, the Skype business case study is unique in how a wildly popular yet deeply troubled, engineering resource rich company can be converted into a an asset that will continue to be the “gold standard” for worldwide ad hoc communications in both the consumer and small business markets.

Watch the video; it’s a compelling – and revealing – story ….

Fortune: Lessons from Skype

¹Five new products:

• Comcast as a new platform for Skype calling
• Launch of video on Android phones
• SkypeKit public beta launch
• Mac 5.2 client announcement (post forthcoming)
• Facebook Video Calling

Related articles

• Skype CEO Teases In-Call Ads (mashable.com)
• Microsoft expects Skype buyout to close by October (electronista.com)
• Skype CEO promises brand will stay intact despite Microsoft acquisition (thenextweb.com)

Yesterday Phil Wolff at Skype Journal brought our attention to an “infographic” from the financial due diligence-minded Credit Score Blog for Focus.com. It attempts to provide a history of Skype both from the technology and financial performance perspectives. But, in addition to Phil’s Quibbles, I have found some others.

Click on the graphic to see a larger image.

Research and Design by Credit Score Blog for Focus.com

Accounts and Users – there’s a difference!

Skype now has registered somewhere beyond 700 million accounts, increasing by over 500,000 every day. But, as has been pointed out often over the past few years, this number in meaningless since over 75% of the accounts have not been used for quite some time for at least three months. Users die, they try out Skype and give it up, a business will register new business accounts for employees who resign or are otherwise terminated. The list of reasons for not using an account can go on forever. (Unlike direct mail lists that can lose 20% of their accuracy every six months, users who move geographically can continue to use their Skype accounts provided they have an Internet connection.)

Starting with the IPO filing last year, Skype finally started to give out a more realistic number – the number of users who actually made at least one call or participated in at least one chat session in the previous calendar quarter. Whereas there were about 125 million in the April – June quarter of 2010, this number has risen to over 170 million for the January to March quarter 2011. In other words this is the number of active users.

So while Skype had registered over 100 million accounts in 2006, they did not reach the level of 100 million users until late 2009 or early 2010. It’s those active users whom become interesting to Microsoft as they work with their Skype team to develop plans for Skype’s (and Microsoft’s) growth.

Skype’s history with Video Calling – Sorting Out High Quality Video and HD Video

Yes, Skype introduced video calling in early 2006; it first came of out beta with Skype for Windows 3.1 in early 2007 delivering 320 x 240 images @15frames-per-second . However, in November 2007, Skype showed it got serious about taking the lead in video calling with the introduction of High Quality Video which required a new line of Logitech webcams, new video codecs from On2 (since acquired by Google) and a new version of Skype for Windows (3.6) that could deliver VGA resolution (640 x 480) at 30 frames-per-second and over a 384 kbps upload speed Internet connection.

With its superior quality that delivered in-your-face real time video, Skype video took off to the point where today video calling represents about 40 per cent of all Skype calls.

In 2010, with the launch of Skype for Windows 4.2, Skype announced support for 720p HD video calling; at the time it only supported webcams from two vendors: the FREETALK Everyman HD and Facevsion N1 webcams. HD video was off to a rocky start; it required at least 1.2 Mbps upload speed on the Internet connection (above the upload speed of most broadband connections) and there were call reliability and stability issues. With a firmware upgrade in December (FREETALK, Facevsion) and the release of Skype 5.0 for Windows, HD video calling has become a much more reliable service. Recently Logitech released a line of webcams that support HD Video calling. Over the past few weeks I have received HD video calls from Logitech webcams where callers had only a 1 Mbps upload speed.

With respect to the Infographic:

• Skype released High Quality Video in late 2007; they did not release HD Video until 2010.
• A major milestone for Skype video calls was the introduction of video calling on iPhones at the end of 2010.
• Finally, in early 2011, Skype took Group Video Calling out of beta, increased its capacity to ten participants and offered it as one component of its revenue generating Skype Premium service.

Microsoft Anywhere Graphic – What Happened to Outlook and Office?

The infographic attempts to illustrate all the potential Microsoft products that could benefit from embedding Skype technology and services. But what happened to Office and, especially, Outlook? At the press conference there was, to say the least, a strong emphasis placed on how Skype could be integrated with Outlook for both consumer and business use.

For Windows users, Outlook has become the core resource for managing users’ contacts; many products’ address books and scheduling features rely on the user’s Outlook Contacts and Calendars as the primary source of contact and calendar information. Outlook is critical for synchronizing a mobile phone address book, keeping the user’s schedule current and integrating Outlook information into third party collaboration services as well as many other Microsoft and third party offerings.

Full disclosure: the author’s first association with Skype involved beta testing of the Skype Email Toolbar, an Outlook plugin that allows you to make Skype calls directly from Outlook. However, the Skype for Windows client now incorporates an optional feature for importing Outlook contacts into a user’s Skype contacts, so this plugin has become a secondary offering.

I’ll place my bets on Outlook being the first or second Microsoft product to find Skype embedded into it.

Skype and Its Competition

That competition bar misses a couple of key aspects of Skype:

• Internationalization: Google Voice really only works  if you live in the U.S.; after all these years it still has no offerings for the rest of us around the world. Personally I have set up a Google Voice account during a recent visit to the U.S. but it’s of no use to me when at home in Canada.
• Technology: Over time Skype has developed some very unique technology that delivers a unique conversation experience; for example,
  • the SILK codec provides crystal clear voice on Skype-to-Skype calls, even when calling from/to iPhones and Android phones.
  • Video: Skype is unique in providing 640 x 480 video calling @ 30 fps via a simple user interface. Since its introduction in late 2007, there has been no competitive service with such a large network of users that can deliver this quality of real time video calls. And now HD video capability is starting to penetrate the user base.
  • Network connection: Skype has introduced features that monitor and adjust to the conditions of a call’s network connection such as to minimize the chance of call failure.

Bottom Line: While the infographic is a good attempt at outlining both Skype’s financial background and user experiences, it is missing some key elements that have the potential to contribute significantly to Microsoft’s ability to benefit from a $8.5 billion acquisition.

The key risk lies in how effectively Microsoft’s various product teams can work with the Skype teams to develop world changing communications-enhanced offerings. It’s a challenge to Microsoft’s ability to support real innovation. This represents the best opportunity for demonstrating Alec Saunders Voice 2.0 Manifesto where talk is the baseline, the meter is “off” and communications-enhanced applications are the value creators.

Related articles

• Microsoft Acquires Skype – The “Amber Mac Test” (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Microsoft Acquires Skype – A Most Interesting Marriage (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Microsoft Acquires Skype – Steve Ballmer Does Skype Europe (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Microsoft Acquires Skype – An Investor’s Perspective (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype’s Rollercoaster History [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com)

Following up on Tuesday’s announcement, where many questioned the valuation placed on Skype by Microsoft, Ben Horowitz of Andreeson Horowitz, one of Skype’s investors in the “Silver Lake round” a year ago November, provides some interesting insight into what Andreeson Horotwitz had seen when they made that initial investment 18 months ago. And these insights provides additional background as to why Microsoft saw an $8.5B acquisition as appropriate.

And, having been involved with or witnessed from behind the scenes a few acquisitions in the past, it provides insight into assessments of acquisitions that journalists simply don’t seem to appreciate. It’s too easy to write that story about how an investment will fail.

Key points:

• Prior to the Silver Lake Round, there were intellectual property issues that, on the surface, made it appear that the company was impossible to buy.
• There was scepticism that Skype could not migrate from solely having Skype clients to the mobile and web client world while maintaining its ease-of-use.
• But the investors recognized that both Skype’s founders and employees were a unique resource:
  

  With a company as complex as Skype, investors draw different conclusions about the same facts. In this case we had the same data as everybody else, but we had a radically higher opinion of Skype’s founders and employees than the doubters and naysayers. We believed that we could work with, rather than against, the founders. And we believed that Skype’s amazing engineering team, led by the original Eastern European software wizards who created the service, could compete and win against anybody.

  We specifically thought that Niklas and Janus, two of the preeminent technology entrepreneurs of our time, wanted Skype to be a huge success and would do everything in their power to make that happen. As a result, we did not think the doomsday scenario that greatly concerned other investors—that the founders would attempt to shut down the company through the courts—was an actual possibility. Based on the founders’ motivations, we felt that we’d quickly settle the IP litigation. Both sides wanted to get on with the business of making Skype more competitive and could not afford to waste time bickering about IP ownership.

  We couldn’t have been more right about that. After quickly settling the litigation, both founders immediately made major contributions to the business through their energy, insight, and intellectual prowess.  And boy did we need them to do that, because we soon faced full frontal assaults from the both Google and Apple.

• They recognized that Skype’s founders were approachable and basically wanted to see Skype succeed.
• Working out a settlement to the intellectual property litigation, they brought the founders into the investors as a resource that could make “major contributions to the business through their energy, insight, and intellectual prowess.”
• The result of the Silver Lake round was increasing growth of the Skype user base (going from about 300,000 new accounts per day to over 500,000), Skye usage (supporting almost 25% of international calling minutes) and, at peak times, over 30 million concurrent users.
• In his summary paragraph Ben sums up how the combination of passionate employees, innovation and Skype’s powerful network effect overcame any competitive attacks, even from a respected player such as Google.
  

  In retrospect, it was easy for people to underestimate the quality of the Skype engineering team and the power of Skype’s network effect. When we bought the company from eBay, many thought that Skype, like so many acquired technology companies, had lost its technical talent. Through our research, we found that Skype had a core group of engineers who were completely dedicated to the mission. They stayed through the eBay acquisition and were hugely determined to make Skype the communications company of the future. Over the past decade, this team consistently introduced ground-breaking technologies ranging from highly resilient and scalable peer-to-peer networking to radically higher sound quality through dramatically superior codecs. In doing so, Skype out-innovated the competition in the most important areas. When combined with its powerful network effect—how valuable is a video calling service if there is nobody to call?—Skype became a formidable competitor. [Editor’s bold]

Bottom line: My long time acquaintance Rick Segal used to talk about looking first at the people before even looking into the technology when considering investments. Over my many years of meeting Skype employees I have consistently found, in spite of an oft-times critical public,  an underlying enthusiasm and passion that says they are on a mission and want to complete that mission.

Now they get to play out that mission under the guidance of a technology business that established many of the business processes for combining marketing, product management, engineering and financial resources into successes. Microsoft has the opportunity to add proven real-time communications services into their existing product line. Skype, as an autonomous business unit within Microsoft, can finally overcome many of  its inhibitors to success and expand significantly on the founders’ initial vision.

Related articles

• The End of the “Skype as Bandit” Era (disruptivetelephony.com)
• Skype’s Real P2P Network (gigaom.com)
• More Skype Rumors: Big News Soon, Microsoft In The Mix (gigaom.com)

Transcribing medical image (X-ray, CT scans, ultrasound) dictations by radiologists and other specialists is a critical pivot point in diagnosing patience conditions and outcomes. Just as important, for both medical and billing purposes, is the coding of the processes involved in taking an image as well as getting the resulting information into patient records. Suffice it to say that one of my previous clients was heavily involved in this area from the medical side; I’ve seen the ongoing demands in this area covering regulatory compliance, patient case management integrity and insurance claim issues.

Enter Oak Horizons, an industry leader in medical transcription training, education, and curriculum development. Simply put they have leveraged Internet communications technology to make their programs available to healthcare facilities across the U.S., not only for the new medical imaging technician or transcriptionist but also ongoing training programs for experienced professionals who need to keep abreast of new developments within their field.

They found that they needed a collaboration resource where they could readily and persistently store lessons and complementary background information, lead training sessions in virtual meeting rooms, and activate tutorial sessions on demand. Enter InnerPass whose combination of online document management, desktop sharing and Skype communications provides an appropriate communications infrastructure that meets these needs. From the press release:

“When students first start their program, be it medical transcription, coding or billing, the course content tends to be very overwhelming,” says Kathryn Martin, owner and instructor at OAK Horizons. “The real-time introduction is very important and helpful, since the course content tends to overwhelm everyone at first. We set up an InnerPass meeting room and walk our students through the first lesson in real-time, and then throughout the semester hold check-in and help sessions. I think it really helps us to set the right tone with our students; that they’ll be learning the material through directed study, but there is real-time help and instruction if they need it,” says Martin.

As OAK Horizons looks to expand its roster of partnership and client organizations, Kathryn Martin realized she needed to set the organization apart from a growing field of competitors. She adopted InnerPass and leveraged the technology to implement a system that facilitates real-time collaboration, content sharing and tutorials between teachers and students. Instructors can invite students to small-group tutorials with a live-participation component, for those students who request extra time with an instructor.

InnerPass provides easy-to-use tools, including screen-sharing and “persistent” meeting rooms, which reduce the cost of online instruction, expand access to education and training opportunities, and bring client organizations to the leading edge of educational and training technology.

Bottom line: For an activity where medical practitioners can lose up to 20% of their potential income due to faulty insurance claims, InnerPass’s aggregation of document sharing and communications allows Oak Horizons’s clients to increase not only patient case integrity but also simplify the revenue recovery process from healthcare insurance companies.

Previous InnerPass posts.

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Since its version 1.0 launch in late 2007, PamFax has provided an easy-to-use web-based fax service, that allows you to send faxes worldwide without any hardware requirements. Initially a fax sending service, PamFax 2.0 introduced features such as a Windows print driver, support for Mac and Linux and inbound faxing to a local number in your area code in 25 countries.

Over the past week Scendix, producer of the cloud-based PamFax service launched PamFax 3.0 with a focus on improving delivery speed, scalability, robustness and access. But to meet these goals they had to start over from scratch, building a newly architected back end that also incorporated new hardware to meet the growing demand for the service.

New features include:

• Faster fax delivery – in my recent experience, the new service was delivering faxes in one to three minutes as opposed to 15 to 30 minutes under the previous setup
• More registration/login options: Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and several others
• Two plans for fax-in numbers:
  • Basic: provides fax-in number for 12 months that allows you to receive an unlimited number of faxes
  • Professional: provides fax-in number for twelve months, 20 fax pages to Zone 1 recipients per month and 33% discount for additional pages, unlimited storage of send and received faxes and “My Company” PamFax Manager to sign up employees and delegate PamFax credits as well as report on company fax activities.
• Three free fax pages upon sign-up to check out the service
• Every new registrant will receive a free Basic Plan for three months, including a fax-in number
• Free faxing from PamFax to a PamFax fax-in number.
• PamFax API’s – allows you to fully embed the PamFax functionality easily and quickly into your application or device

PamFax continues to offer:

• A simple, straight forward five or six step process for sending a fax
• Fax from a Windows/Mac/Linux client or online via a web browser
• Operation from any web browser worldwide with no additional hardware requirement.
• A portal to manage your fax activity
• Fax status messages to e-mail, SMS and/or Skype chat
• No minimum commitments
• Support for over 100 file formats
• Payment either pay-as-you-go or via PamFax Credit packs
• No contracts or ongoing obligations

Often my posts on PamFax bring up the question of “who’s using faxes today”? With various alternatives for exchanging documents electronically, one would think that faxing is becoming passé. However, with billions of fax machines still attached to phone lines and the ongoing need for “recognized originals”, such as contract execution signatures, Scendix reports that their monthly page volumes continues to grow at a significant pace. And, were the market not still a significant one, Scendix would not have invested their resources since last summer in the  very extensive development of the PamFax 3.0 platform.

Yet, with PamFax, fax activity can become paperless and “totally green”. Sending documents involves simply attaching a document (in over 100 formats) during the fax set up process unless it is one that has to be scanned in. While there are options for printing received faxes, they can also simply be read on the user’s PamFax portal and printed only when absolutely necessary.

The Scendix team has prepared an “office drama” introductory video about how PamFax brings relief to the frustrations of faxing:

An introduction to PamFax from PamFax on Vimeo.

Voice On The Web posts about PamFax

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Since the initial announcement of Skype for SIP a year ago today, with the goal of integrating some elements of Skype’s infrastructure into legacy PBX systems that support SIP, Skype has been expanding its partner base as well as incorporating its deployment into the Skype for Business program.

To repeat: the purpose and goals of Skype for SIP are:

• to allow small-to-medium businesses to reduce their international calling cost to over 180 countries through use of Skype Out business subscriptions (without the need to negotiate and manage country-specific contracts with the telcos in each country)
• to provide a free, optionally international, click-to-call inbound calling capability through Skype Online numbers
• to allow integration of these elements of Skype into legacy PBX systems that support SIP

Recalling that Skype for SIP is still at a public open beta stage, Skype participated in four announcements yesterday that expand this ecosystem and the open beta activity with a “third party” Skype for SIP certification partner and three new PBX Gateway partners:

• Skype Selects tekVizion Labs to Manage Skype for SIP Interoperability Certification Program

tekVizion Labs has been introduced to the Skype partner community as the interoperability experts to help expedite Skype for SIP interoperability testing and certification. In addition to Skype for SIP interoperability testing, tekVizion Labs can provide consulting, integration and support services to Skype’s customers and partners and the systems integrators and value added resellers they work with.

• Grandstream Achieves Skype for SIP Interoperability Certification

Interoperability with Skype for SIP gives SMBs the ability to receive inbound calls through their Grandstream GXE IP PBX or related gateways from more than 521 million registered Skype users around the world at no additional cost to the Skype user when calling through Skype. Businesses can leverage the investment in their corporate website even further by enabling Skype users to simply click on a global click-to-call button on the website to place immediate calls to sales or support via Skype. Skype calls received through the Grandstream IP PBX are handled by the PBX in the same way as other inbound calls. For outbound calling, Grandstream customers can realize significant cost savings to landlines and mobile phones around the world using Skype’s low-cost calling rates.

• Skype for SIP now Interoperable with AudioCodes Mediant 1000 Multi-Service Business Gateways

By certifying the AudioCodes Multi-Service Business Gateways with Skype for SIP, customers can benefit from interoperability with hundreds of TDM PBXs, Key Systems, and IP-PBXs that have not been able to connect to Skype so far. In addition, if a company buys and associates an online Skype number with their AudioCodes Mediant 1000 Multi-Service Business Gateway solution, it can then receive inbound calls via Skype from business contacts and customers calling from landline and mobile phones.

• VoSKY’s New PBX Gateway Is [Amongst] Industry’s First to Achieve Skype for SIP Certification

The VoSKY SSG is available in two versions, supporting either 4 or 8 channels. It offers seamless integration with Skype for SIP Open Beta with any analog PBX or key system, connecting via a conventional (FXS) analog port. It allows businesses to take advantage of Skype’s cost savings and enhanced business features without restructuring their existing communications network and infrastructure.

As a result the Skype for SIP ecosystem grows beyond the initial partnerships announced with Shoretel, SIP Foundry and Cisco. Skype for SIP Certification ensures that Skype’s partners meet established standards not only for the technology behind the implicit interoperability required but also the user experience. And these partnerships allow Skype to leverage each vendor’s existing customer base to build awareness and revenues while disintermediating and disrupting legacy long distance business models.

Bottom line: With all the various Skype for Business activities coming this year, including the launch later this spring of the FREETALK Connect PBX incorporating both Skype for SIP and Skype for Asterisk (which also supports free Skype-to-Skype calling), small-to-medium businesses will have several options to both lower their communications cost, have customer calls directed to appropriate employees and/or end points, and expand their markets through low cost communications to new international markets.

Link to a list of all Voice On The Web posts discussing Skype for SIP.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FreeTalk Connect PBX, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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• FREETALK Connect, the worlds first Skype-enabled Unified Communications system. (saunderslog.com)
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Skype launches an Open Beta phase for its Skype for SIP service. Over 10,000 businesses worldwide have lined up to join the program.

Over the past eight months, Skype has been running a closed Skype for SIP beta program. A couple of PBX vendor agreements have been signed while Skype personnel have been having discussions with potential Skype for Business customers about their use of business communications processes.

Yetersday Skype has announced the launch of the Skype for SIP Open Beta program. According to Skype’s press release nearly ten thousand businesses around the world have applied to participate in this open beta phase. However, this phase is also open to any new applicants, whether PBX manufacturers, SIP gateway vendors or individual enterprises, who want to learn how they can take advantage of Skype for SIP in their business communications.

And why the interest? Skype for SIP:

• allows a business to provide inbound calling from a Skype client (whether on a PC or embedded in devices such as the RTX 3088 Dualphone), web-based click-to-call buttons or a Skype Online number through a SIP-enabled PBX or Unified Communications system.
• provisions outbound calling to landlines and mobile phones worldwide at SkypeOut rates
• has a monthly fee of $6.95/€4.95 per month per concurrent voice channel (which can handle either inbound or outbound calls)
• is managed from the Skype Business Control Panel:
  • to create and manage employees’ or outsourced resources’ Skype accounts
  • to subscribe to Skype Online numbers
  • to allocate SkypeOut credits to employees’ Skype accounts
• allows management of Skype calls via the existing PBX or UC features, such as call routing, conferencing, phone menus and voice mail
• can bring significant communication cost savings to enterprises, whether large, medium or small, especially if they are addressing continental or worldwide markets

From the Skype press release:

A company’s IT administrator just creates and registers a Skype Business Control Panel (BCP) for the organization and then follows the instructions to configure Skype for SIP to work with its existing SIP-enabled communications system. This Web-based tool allows a company to control its Skype usage from a single point and enables centralized billing, easy allocation of Skype Credit, subscriptions and online numbers to users, as well as reporting about both usage and spending. Furthermore, it gives companies the ability to manage internal employee accounts, including who uses Skype and who doesn’t and what features they can use.

As an example of the cost savings, Enterprise Business Development Manager Matthew Jordan described a company who would replace a T1 line with 23 lines at a cost of, say, $400 per month plus per minute toll charges, at up to,say, $0.03/minute, for both inbound and outbound calls. With Skype for SIP, the company would be looking at a cost of $161 per month for the 23 voice channels plus low SkypeOut rates for outbound calls to landlines and mobile phones anywhere worldwide and no charges for inbound calls.

From Skype’s perspective, a primary goal of this beta phase is to monitor usage to determine experience-based usage patterns. To facilitate this goal,  during this open beta Skype for SIP will have a 20% burstage allowances such that a company with 10 channels can actually use up to 12 channels as a means to optimize bursting levels required  based on real calling patterns. With over 10,000 Skype for SIP customers, they hope to gain statistically significant data as well as learn more about scalability and robustness issues.

The entire systems is designed to be global and scalable as numbers build. The required SIP gateways (at sip.skype.com) will be independent of SIP gateways used for legacy consumer SkypeOut calling.

Skype for SIP is a classic case of a transitional offering. Enterprises continue to use their legacy SIP-enabled PBX and then add Skype for SIP such that they can continue making calls but run them over Skype for SIP to reduce costs as they feel more and more comfortable with the advantages of the Skype for SIP exerience. It provides a low cost means of adding voice channels; it also allows a company to expand their calling into new countries at low SkypeOut rates with the only provisioning being the initial setup of Skype for SIP via the business control panel.

More information, including an introductory video, can be obtained and Business Control Panel accounts set up at the Skype for SIP beta website at sip.skype.com.

• Peter Parkes: Skype for Business Blog: Skype for SIP beta program opens up to all businesses.
• All Voice On The Web posts mentioning Skype for SIP.
• Andy Abramson talks about the “Skype Pipe”; he thinks “…. Skype just created a massive pipe into the corporate market.”

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• Christopher Dean, Skype CSO at VON 2009: Skype Becoming Disruptive About Business (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype for SIP: Getting Legitimization, Endorsement and Traction (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype for Asterisk Release Marries Skype Calling into Popular Asterisk PBX Platform (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype Taps ShoreTel for Enterprise Play (gigaom.com)
• Skype For SIP Interoperability With Cisco Gear Confirmed (techcrunchit.com)
• Skype Selects Acme Packet’s Session Border Controllers to Ease Interoperability with IP PBXes for Skype for SIP Beta Offering (skype.com)
• How Skype Plans to Dominate Business Telephony (gigaom.com)
• Barriers to using Skype for business fall away (infoworld.com)

In a recent post, I provided some examples where Skype is being used by small businesses to build relationships with a worldwide supplier and customer base. In the same post I provided a couple of examples where current economic conditions are helping to stealth Skype into enterprises in the medium to large business category. Skype itself claims that about 30% of its use is by businesses. At a blogging for business workshop a week ago and a local WordCamp this past weekend I again encountered several entrepreneurs for whom Skype was a key tool for conversations.

It seems that Skype wants to build up a repository of case studies involving business use of Skype. Last week Skype asked businesses to share their experiences with Skype as a business tool.

We’re looking for businesses like yours to share their experiences with us at Skype. We’re looking for creativity and originality – companies which use Skype in innovative ways around the world to save time, save money or stay ahead, and preferably a combination of the three.

The contest will be judged with three prizes to be  awarded involving Skype credits using Skype’s Business Control Panel along with Skype certified hardware products. More details are available at Peter Parkes post announcing the competition.

While the application form encourages the use of photos and video to support entries, it would also be useful to learn about how Skype not only reduces costs but also how Skype’s services impact business processes, customer/supplier relationships and team building across a geographically disbursed operation. And it’s not simply about voice conversations but are you using Skype chat for virtual water cooler conversations and Skype video to enhance conversations? Or do your activities involve one or more of Skype’s partner’s products for conferencing sessions, call center operations or document management?

Do you have a story to share?

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• Multiple Business Control Panels Per Company: A Thing I Really Want from Skype for Business (skypejournal.com)

Legion are the stories of small and medium businesses who are using Skype for their worldwide communications operations.

• Skype is the cornerstone for keeping Toronto-based  b5media’s worldwide staff of bloggers, editors, developers and executives in touch via both informal and formal conversations.
• SeeWorthy gets an assist from Skype when communicating with their Taiwanese supplier (via an Alberta-based translator), North American and Caribbean agents, and prospective European distributors as well as their customers.
• A Canadian-headquartered resource company is using Skype voice and IM for communications with their operations in Asia; their biggest challenge involves time-zone issues. Skype chat’s inherent asynchronous nature helps to address that issue.

Skype itself claims that about 30% of all its user activity is business related. I often encounter small businesses who have a wealth of stories about how Skype contributes to their business success.

But during a recent conversation with OnState CEO Pat Kelly I learned about how Skype is stealthing its way into medium to large enterprises. Pat discussed two examples (who will remain generic until case studies are available):

• OnState received an enquiry from a major North American parts distributor whose operations involve agents, resellers and business customers spread out across North America. While this company has an internal IT team, the CFO was focused on significant cost reductions for their call center operations. He has now contracted OnState to provide voice, chat and other customer relationship communications activities that do not simply save money but provide additional communications processes such as IM with its inherent presence and chat features. Once the contract was signed, the CFO mentioned he would guide his IT personnel with their role in the implementation.
• A European country manager for a worldwide, US-headquartered business found that he was getting charge-backs for “corporate” communications services that did not meet his particular needs. He had enough autonomy that he investigated OnState’s services, went through not only the technical specifications but also the legal reviews and business process requirements. He is now meeting the communications needs of his business ecosystem using Skype and OnState’s other auxiliary services for call center and virtual PBX requirements. Subsequently other European subsidiaries of the same company are implementing OnState’s services. Yet this is a situation where the U.S. head office has yet to be contacted about what additional opportunities for Skype and OnState may exist within their business.

Pat’s key point is that, in today’s economically stressed environments, there’s a trend where CFO’s and business unit managers are making the key communications services decisions in larger enterprises in order to meet their financial goals. IT personnel are playing little or no role in the decision making although they may be involved to a limited degree in the implementation. What are Pat’s key observations?

• The consumer experience with Skype is stealthing its way into business implementations, not only with prosumers and small businesses but also at the business unit level within larger enterprises.
• Why? Skype just plain works. There are no firewall issues; OnState’s SaaS model eliminates capital investment for PBX’s and related infrastructure.
• It’s relatively easy to implement.
• Economic pressures are driving adoption.
• Where a business partner or customer has Skype also, HD Voice, incorporating SILK, provide for more productive voice conversations.
• It’s not simply about using a technical mashup across multiple services (Skype, Google, and Voxbone, for example) involved in OnState implementations; it’s a “business mashup” involving business processes and employee acceptance.

It’s a repeat of a trend that drove personal computers into larger enterprises twenty-five years ago. I recall one story where a Canadian bank Vice President found an employee with a PC that had a modem attached (with, at best, a 1200 kbps speed). The modem was ordered disconnected! Bank security was going to be upheld despite technology progress. Four years later that same bank ordered over 10,000 PC cards from my employer of the day for inclusion in their new, at the time, teller terminal system.

Bottom Line: Even if it’s not totally free it’s the raw cost savings that are driving Skype adoption, sometimes in co-operation with their business software partners. It’s about not only lower calling costs but also the elimination of capital asset costs. For some business markets Skype is stealthing its way into business communications infrastructure.

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• OnState Upgrades On Demand Call Center and Virtual PBX (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype Modifies Fair Usage Policy (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Business Long Distance: Death by 1,000,000 PBX’s (voiceontheweb.biz)

OnState Communications provides hosted communications services that allow any size of business to operate a call center or PBX with low cost worldwide access via Skype, Skype Online numbers or the PSTN, including toll-free and DID numbers. Low monthly fees and service charges (covering inbound numbers and outbound PSTN calling) along with zero capital expenditures are the selling points that have driven evaluation and adoption across a range of businesses.

During early May OnState will be upgrading their services to add:

• a “My Account” dashboard that tracks credits and charges for services such as toll-free numbers and SkypeOut charges in real time
• OnState Mobile allows employees to use their mobile phones (such as iPhone and BlackBerry) to participate as part of a call center operation, either directly receiving customer calls, transferring to another employee in the company, or acting as a secondary support resource to a business’s core sales and support teams
• Warm Transfer and Conferencing for OnState Anywhere — A warm transfer allows an agent to speak with a new caller before transferring the original caller to provide a better calling experience.
• Outbound calling with Caller ID in OnState Anywhere. Enables calling from any device (Skype, SIP soft phone, etc) with a unique Caller ID displayed to your customers.
• Support for SIP Phones. While most calls are handled via softphones, such as the Skype client, OnState services now support selected Polycomm and Grandstream SIP phone sets.
• Several other service tweeks and modifications; check out the OnState blog post for the details.

OnState will be upgrading services to all their current clients over the first ten days of May. As with many other players in the economically challenged Voice 2.0 world, I confirmed in a recent interview with OnState CEO Pat Kelly that they are finding increasing demand in the small-to-medium business market for their SaaS-based services. The key selling point remains offering a disruptively cost effective way to communicate across an enterprise ecosystem comprising employees, customers and suppliers.

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• Business Long Distance: Death by 1,000,000 PBX’s (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype Dials Up Bid for Business (wired.com)

Over the past three days there has been a continuous stream of presentations that provide insight into a wide range of issues, opportunities and perspectives in the IP-based communications space going forward. While there will be more posts covering individual presentations, it’s worth taking time to mention a few highlights:

• Most innovative, outside-the-box, presentation: Ge Wang of SMULE (Sonic Mule) and his presentation including recordings of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO). Become your own iPhone musician by breathing gently into the iPhone’s mic using their Ocarina iPhone application (warning: small fee $0.99).
• Most outstanding announcements: three offerings that open up new user experience opportunities in a Voice 2.0 world (Yes, I already blogged about these but they still stand out as winners for both the service providers and end users.)
  • Voxeo: Tropo.com opens up the Voxeo platform,  previously limited to the small population of voice developers, to hundreds of thousands of web developers.
  • Skype: making the superwideband SILK codec available royalty-free to any relevant hardware or software vendor that wants to bring new user experiences to voice calling.
  • Jaduka: the appointment of Thomas Howe as CEO will accelerate the adoption of voice into existing business processes, eliminating the error-prone mundane while opening up new standards for applications such as healthcare procedures, customer satisfaction and service deployment.
• Other presentations of note:
  • Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy, BT: there is value in addressing issues of efficiency and effectiveness inherent to business processes. Martin proposes that the key business model is to satisfy the needs of parties who want to interact with customers; for instance, improve the productivity of call center employees
  • Shai Berger, Fonolo, whose deep dialing service has now mapped out the IVR trees of over 500 companies and presents new opportunities for customer service operations.
  • Mobivox, expanding their voice-activated mobile services platform with their CRM for Voice business tools.
  • iNum, announcing support for IM and presence, initially with Google Talk
  • Alan Duric continues to see ongoing profitability and success at Norwegian service provider Telio. Why? a continuous stream of innovation and new value-added services.
• Some themes and issues across multiple presentations:
  • Spectrum 2.0: several presentations and a panel covering issues related to (the lack of) spectrum management and “white space”. In major markets over 90% of available spectrum remains unutilized.
  • Regulatory issues: the challenge of creating and executing a user-oriented regulatory framework under “the first technology administration”. Network neutrality: is it more a “buzz phrase” than a real issue? Seeding the policy makers with players who understand regulatory issues from both an innovation and business opportunity orientation as opposed to supporting monopolies or duopolies. Aligning regulation with the application potential of emerging communications technology.
  • API’s: several presentations from vendors who provide free API’s that support third party developers in writing applications that are then hosted by the vendor: IfByPhone, Voxeo, Jaduka, Ribbit, Adhearsion (whose Jay Phillips, right, provided a tutorial incorporating programming to Skype for Asterisk),

One note: there were a lot of innovators and forward thinking people amongst both the speakers and the audience. Most interesting was that there were at least six attendees from carriers who were asking the questions about how carriers can adapt to this emerging communications world: SaskTel (2), T-Mobile US, Rogers, NTT. eComm’s biggest challenge for next year will be to attract a larger audience of carrier personnel. In personal conversations I learned a lot about their issues that may work its way into future commentary.

Overall, eComm 2009 once again provided a primer in a wide range of aspects of the emerging communications space. With Thomas Howe leading Jaduka’s CEBP charge into larger enterprises, Voxeo addressing a huge community of web developers, Skype offering new levels of call quality to the entire communications hardware and software community, Fonolo solving that PITA known as punching your way through company IVR systems and Calliflower offering new user experiences in conference calls, the next few months will prove most interesting. Most challenging to observe will be how these technologies and services assist business and personal issues in times of a most challenging overall economy.

Timothy Hay, Wall Street Journal wrote up Jon Arnold’s panel on “New Ways to Monetize Voice” : VoIP Start-Ups Scramble To Find Niche (subscription may be required)

Alec Saunders: eComm – strong stuff

Thomas Howe has long been noted for his expertise in developing “Communications Enhanced Business Processes” (“CEBP”). Fundamentally this involves embedding communications facilitation into a legacy business process such as to reduce operating overheads and/or increase employee productivity. From many of the examples I have seen, I would call it eliminating the “intrinsically mundane” from any requirements for human intervention or participation at a given stage in a business process.

Enriched with his unique sense of humor Thomas has spent the past three years evangelizing CEBP through consulting contracts, speaking at seminars and forums and his personal weblog. Today, Jaduka, a provider of business process optimization through “blending real-time communications into critical workflows”, announced that Thomas has been appointed as CEO of Jaduka. Through this appointment Thomas gets to execute on his passion by seeing his vision implemented across a wide range of enterprises of all sizes.

In a Calliflower conference call this morning Thomas provided more details about where he sees Jaduka heading:

“My focus will be on helping our enterprise software partners and customers employ communications to improve efficiency, employee productivity and customer experience. With an API accessed by companies a million times daily and a platform with 1 billion user accounts, Jaduka is well positioned to serve both the $250 billion BPO and $350 billion Telco 2.0 marketplaces.”

• Jaduka is focused on embedding voice into existing enterprise applications; they are NOT a provider of voice applications (see Voxeo for these)
• the Jaduka API is already called upon over one million times per day demonstrating that it is a solid, tested, robust service
• Jaduka has solved the problem of scalability; this is perhaps Jaduka’s leading differentiation from any competitors
• Jaduka is looking to launch a new service that will make it radically easy to integrate voice into current enterprise applications
• Jaduka focuses its marketing efforts on enterprise developers (and not telephony or voice developers); they look to partner opportunities with enterprise software vendors such as Oracle and SAP as well as system integrators.

Thomas was another of Andy Abramson’s “draft picks” for leading change in the conversation and communications space. From my own personal experience interacting with Thomas over the past eighteen months, Jaduka has a winner at the top who can now deliver cost savings and productivity enhancements to many, many enterprises in these economically challenging times.

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• Howe goes to Jaduka (saunderslog.com)

Tomorrow morning I’ll be heading out to San Francisco for eComm 2009. Kudos to organizer Lee Dryburgh, who on his own initiative and at his own personal risk, launched this event last year. Late last week Lee was able to announce that registrations had surpassed last year’s attendance.

Attendees should come away with not only a much better understanding of how this will be a watershed year for telecommunications. The combination of shaky economies, emerging Voice 2.0 offerings and opportunities for more effective personal and business communications is creating a “Perfect Storm” for a watershed year in the communications space. Smartphones, video calling, collaboration services, communications enhanced business processes, communications infrastructure, business models and regulatory issues will all be on the menu. From the eComm press release last week:

Included among the dozen keynote speakers and scores of other presenters over the three days of eComm2009 are:

•    Ge Wang, assistant professor at Stanford University and co-founder, CTO and chief creative officer of Smule.com;
•    Jonathan Christensen, general manager for audio and video at Skype;
•    John Forsyth, vice president of strategy at Symbian;
•    Malcolm Matson, founder of the OPLAN Foundation and entrepreneur;
•    Michael Calabrese, vice president, and Sascha Meinrath, research director, both of the wireless future program at the New America Foundation;
•    Tony Jebara, co-founder and chief scientist at Sense Networks and assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University;
•    Media futurist Gerd Leonhard;
•    Richard Whitt, telecommunications and media counsel for Google in Washington, D.C.;
•    Martin Geddes, head of strategy at BT Design;
•    Benjamin Joffe, founder and CEO of +8*;
•   Mark Rolston, chief creative officer of Frog Design.

Sponsors include Skype, MetaSwitch, NEC Sphere, Voxbone, Global IP Solutions, Voxeo, Jaduka, Ribbit and Broadsoft.

I have already been approached by some companies for interviews (although with full days through to 9 p.m., scheduling interviews may be a challenge) and been made aware of announcements coming from Skype, Voxeo and Jaduka. I’m sure there will be others; it will be a most interesting week.

As Lee says at the end of the press release:

Those wishing to register online may do so at  http://www.amiando.com/ecomm2009.html. For an additional $100, attendees may register on site.

And by entering the promotional code “one touch”, you’ll get a 20% discount courtesy of Voice On The Web.

P.S. – Given that there are many these days in need of social assistance, whether food, shelter or otherwise, Lee has announced that “10% of any profit from the event will be given back to the local community by donating it to the Shelter Network (http://www.shelternetwork.org)”, a Bay Area non-profit undertaking that assists families and individuals with housing issues. Lee has personally guaranteed a minimum $2,000 donation and undertook an interesting social networking experiment to help raise additional funds.

Last day to register today for Regular Pricing; Late pricing applies for registrations after Feb.17, 2009. Enter “one touch” for a 20% discount.

Two weeks ago eComm 2009 organizer Lee Dryburgh observed that:

With the heavy backdrop of economic doom and gloom everywhere I’d been finding it ever more strange that virtually every company I was dealing with in relation to the 2009 conference, was reporting accelerating business let alone [as opposed to] flat or declining business.

Via a Skype multi-party call he held a virtual panel discussion involving:

• Jonathan Christensen (Skype)
• Irv Shaprio (IfByPhone)
• Rodrigue Ullens (Voxbone)
• Graham Brierton (Voicesage)on this topic.

When asked about today’s economy he repeatedly found eComm 2009’s sponsors saying “Oh no, we’re actually doing better, due to the downturn”. So he asked each of the panelists what their offering was doing such as to accelerate their business.

Graham Brierton (VoiceSage):

For example, we had a company that the key thing they wanted to do was bring in their debts cheaper and quicker, instead of reminding people to pay their bills.  Part of the paying the bill process was transferring them back into a call center to actually collect the money.  What we noticed when we analyzed the data was they were getting a hell of a lot of people that were wanting to pay between 3:55 p.m. and 4:05 p.m.  We still don’t know the reason why there is a peak at that point, but there is a peak at that point.

One of the issues that these guys had was that they couldn’t actually take all of those calls because they had a shift change at 4:00 p.m.  They were unaware that because they had a shift change there were a lot of people that wanted to engage in a process with them but they weren’t allowing it because of their internal business processes.  They actually changed that.  That came as a direct result of simply looking at the data generated from the interactions that their customers were having with us, and us trying to collect money from them.

Irv Shapiro (IfByPhone):

Batteries Plus is a franchise-based business in the United States and Canada that has hundreds of retail stores that sell only batteries.  If you need a battery for anything, you go into Batteries Plus or you go to their website and you can purchase a battery.

In many, many cases, people need a battery right away so they want to go to a store.  Batteries Plus was finding that they were fielding hundreds and hundreds of phone calls to stores asking for routine information such as “What are your hours of operation; which is the closest store to my address…?”  We automated that process for them.

In fact, they automated it themselves by going to our website, provisioning a toll-free number, putting in a IVR on the front end that asked a couple of very simple questions to determine whether the customer was looking for information about batteries.  In that case, the call was transferred to a central call center corporate.  Were they looking for the closest location, in which a geo-coded application automatically provided them with the closest location and driving information.  If they were looking for store hours of operation, same geo-code process except in this case we retrieved the hours of operation.

They found a dramatic increase in the productivity of their in-store personnel because now those personnel could concentrate on spending time with customers in the store.  The side effect of that is they sell more batteries.

Rod Ullens (Voxbone), who reported business growing at 15% per month:

At some point, they [cloud based services such as VoiceSage and IfByPhone] need to reach the PSTN.  Most of them actually need a telephone number to be activated.  The bigger they get, the bigger we get.  That’s already one reason.  It’s not necessarily because of us, but because of our customers that have services that are interesting, and we grow with them.

If you look at the way numbers were used in the past, where you had a telephone number that was just linked to a physical location, that’s all you can do with it.  The cost to dial such a number is pretty expensive.  What we’ve done is to just completely take away the geographical link.  Now a number is just a software-based identifier that people can use to call you on.  It’s very flexible.  You can just build up a service.

First of all, that service can be completely Internet based.  You can just use telephone numbers from Voxbone to make it reachable from traditional phone networks, from mobile phones and so on.  Basically, you can be a company and have a virtual presence in a lot of countries.  From day one, you can start a service provider, in forty-five countries.  I think that’s one major reason why we’ve grown, especially now.

Jonathan Christensen (GM Audio and Video Platforms, Skype), in response to Lee’s question: “What do you think is driving these minutes?  Is it businesses using Skype, for a change, in order to save money, for example?”

We’re seeing two things.  One is just consumer migration to value; people want to avoid long distance, but we also see in the consumer space a network effect around your friends being there, the quality being great, it being convenient and easy.  We have a large constituency of people where it is the convenience, free, and easy factor.

On the business side, Gartner, for example, recently said they kind of backed off their position that Skype is dangerous, evil, and will introduce Trojans into your network, and so on.  We hear; we have a bunch of case studies and we hear more and more from corporate IT, these commandments to their workforce saying, “When you’re travelling, when you’re making long distance calls, when you’re going to be faced with insane roaming charges, please try to use Skype.  It works, it’s easy, you can download it, it’s free”.  We are seeing acceleration in that sector, as well.

These are snippets from the discussion; Lee has transcribed the entire session in a eComm 2009 blog post.

Note that while all the participants in this call will be presenting, Jonathan Christensen will be delivering a keynote presentation: “Codec Evolution and Industry Proposal” along with a Skype announcement.

Bottom line: if you’re looking for value in communications services that drive business decisions, if you want to be a player in the emerging communications space, eComm 2009 provides the best opportunity to get a three day education in how the Voice 2.0 world will evolve. It’s an opportunity to network with the thinkers and business leaders who will be providing services for that market space. That’s why I’ve convinced a friend who is a 34-year veteran in the Canadian telecomm market to come; he wants his new consultancy to have relevance going forward.

Register here; enter “one touch” to get a 20% discount. Speakers. Schedule.

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• SILK: Skype’s New Audio Codec Sets New Performance Standards for Voice Conversations (voiceontheweb.com)
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When Skype’s Unlimited Calling Plans were modified last May, the only “Fair Usage” limitation was 10,000 minutes per month on any of the plans. Recently my attention was drawn to a modified Fair Usage policy. Primarily it would appear that the new Fair Usage policy would apply to businesses using SkypeOut for customer service and customer acquisition activities.

The new policy adds:

• calling to a maximum of 50 numbers per day
• maximum six (6) hours of SkypeOut calling per day
• each subscription is to be used by one person only and not to be shared with any other user (whether by a PBX, call center, computer or any other means).

On considering these further:

• a user can make repeated calls to a single number without impacting the “50 numbers per day” limitation
• each employee using call center or PBX services, such as OnState’s Call Center or Virtual PBX requires a separate Skype calling plan subscription for outbound calling
• the six hour per day limitation could build up quickly on a Skype multi-party call with multiple participants connected via SkypeOut
• these limitations only impact Skype services where third party termination charges are involved – all Skype-to-Skype calling remains free
• they would not appear to affect services such as Skype Trunking via a Vosky Exchange where they talk only about “call Skype users for free” and “low cost SkypeOut rates as low as 2.2 cents per minute to most landlines worldwide”

Upon exceeding any of these limits, normal SkypeOut rates and connection fees will apply for additional minutes, Of course this requires that you have Skype credits available; otherwise you may find a call cut off in the middle of a heavy conversation.

Two observations:

• When business is generating revenue or providing support via Skype’s outbound services, one should expect some cost. Skype continues to provide competitive rates for reliable, robust business calling.
• New Skype management is obviously reviewing all its business activities with a view to ensuring that consumer users can continue to benefit from the low cost of services available via Skype Calling Plans while those who are incurring heavy termination fees (and other costs) will support the cost of such usage levels.

Hat tip to participants in the Skype 4.x Discussion Public Chat for bringing this to my attention.

Update: UberOverLord developer Don Kennedy has published “Subscription Monitor for Skype” to track your Skype subscription usage in real time.

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A year ago August IBM‘s Lotus Sametime Division announced the acquisition of Skype Partner Webdialogs to obtain their widely respected Unyte Desktop Sharing collaboration technology. About four months later we learned, from Lou Guercia, Lotus SameTime’s Director of Operations and Strategy, more about Unyte’s integration into the Lotus SameTime offerings. In that post on Lou’s presentation I asked:

Question: with IBM pursuing excellence on a service that comprises voice, video, chat and file transfer in a secure, encrypted environment, and with the stated goals of “working with their partners”, would this not result in a situation where IBM would be licensing Skype technology to provide a comprehensive real time multi-media communications infrastructure?

With announcements this week, including some at IBM’s annual Lotusphere 2009 event in Orlando, FL, it seems like that question is starting to get some answers..

Yesterday IBM announced “A Strong Fourth Quarter, a rarity these days“. ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett, in Can IBM sustain its momentum, goes on the provide some background, pointing out that most of IBM’s growth is occuring in its software division. Certainly IBM sees its Lotus Sametime division as a key to sustaining their momentum. Except it appears that IBM has reorganized their SameTime collaborative services into “a cloud-based porfolio of social networking and collaboration services designed for business” under a new name: LotusLive.

In a press release this past Monday, in conjunction with the annual Lotusphere event, Skype announced:

…. it will integrate Skype™ functionality with LotusLive (www.lotuslive.com), IBM’s new cloud services which are designed to help individuals build communities to work smarter, more effectively and more efficiently across and beyond their own companies. Skype’s voice and video calling will add rich, real-time communications capabilities to LotusLive, making it even easier for enterprises to collaborate in the cloud.

At Lotusphere 2009, IBM demonstrated the new Skype integration into LotusLive Engage, “an integrated suite of tools that combines your network [of contacts] with Web conferencing and collaboration capabilities like file storing and sharing, instant messaging and chart creation.”

Today we interviewed Peter Kalmstrom, Skype’s Program Manager for Toolbars, who had been attending Lotusphere to assist with the demonstrations. Peter made several points:

• This announcement covers only the first step of what will be a series of Skype integrations into the LotusLive offerings.
• The integration into LotusLive Engage is targeted at “businesses looking to collaborate inside and outside the organization to easily expand their networks…” In other words for businesses that need to include, say, sub-contractors, third party consultants, suppliers and buyers within their business operation processes.
• Within a LotusLive Engage contact profile, “Skype” fields have been added such that when a user clicks on a a name to bring up a profile card, the user can launch a Skype conversation and transfer files with a single click.
• The only additional requirement for engaging in a Skype conversation is that the initiating user must have a Skype client open.
• In addition to Skype-to-Skype calls, SkypeOut calls can also be made.
• Where several contact profile cards have been opened, a user can launch a Skype multi-party call
• Due to the nature of LotusLive Engage’s web architecture, the resulting Skype access is cross-platform; it does NOT require that the user have a Skype web (FF or IE) toolbar installed.
• A session can then also launch a Lotus Web Meeting (also known as a Lotus SameTime Unyte meeting).

Sounds like the Lotusphere demonstrations got the brainstorming going between Skype and IBM. In a concluding statement Peter said:

“We are enthusiastic about the partnership with IBM and we see a lot of areas where we can collaborate and help each other improve our services. We met with a series of executives at IBM during Lotusphere and the general feeling was highly positive.”

At the same time IBM announced Salesforce.com and LinkedIn integration into their LotusLive services. Andy at VoIP Watch comments on the competitive “collaboration and communications” space where IBM LotusLive, Microsoft Office Live and Google Apps are the key players.

With the IBM offering, we are seeing one more example of “Skype Everywhere”, in this case, being embedded into an offering that is key to IBM’s future success in delivering cloud-based outsourced business services.

Phil will have some comments on the technical aspects of this integration along with where he feels there are “deeper” integration opportunities.

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At CES 2009 COO Scott Durchslag spoke about “liquid communications” and “Skype Wherever, Whenever”. InnerPass has developed a business-class hosted document management system; they have been marketing it via private label to over 3000 businesses or project teams on several continents.Over the past year the InnerPass team has developed a Skype Extra application that introduces real time communications, and serves as an interface, into this system.  From their website:

InnerPass helps companies control their business critical files from anywhere and anytime. Our applications are delivered thru various Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings that are entirely web-based. InnerPass primarily offers its applications to end users through a network of partners who can private label and embed the software service into their own solutions or provide as a stand alone service.

InnerPass Share and Collaborate Home Page

InnerPass starts out its communications enhanced service, called InnerPass Share and Collaborate, by building persistent document “meeting rooms” that store mission critical documents such as FDA filings, engineering and architectural drawings, legal agreements, real estate papers and other business documents which require:

• access across a geographically dispersed team of project stakeholders
• persistent storage for asynchronous 24/7/365 access
• version management

amongst other features. InnerPass has taken their document management service experience and gone a step further to support file sharing, collaboration and real time communications. They embed, within their own Skype Extra client, the ability to launch and hold real time voice and/or chat conversations, whether informal ad hoc sessions or scheduled conference calls, to discuss the underlying projects, sales meetings or other business team activity.

Using InnerPass Share and Collaborate, a user can set up a “meeting room”, store documents, launch conversations and share a designated screen for presentations or demonstrations. The room’s host can designate and invite team members from amongst his/her Skype contact list, grant permission to their team members to contribute or modify room content. From anywhere in the client, any team member has the ability to schedule and launch conference calls or group chats using the integrated Skype services.

InnerPass offers three levels of their collaboration service. A free service supports up to 3 meeting rooms with a maximum of 3 participants and 1GB of file storage (max 25MB per file). Offering perpetual file storage, the Professional Plan at $4.95/month supports 10 meeting rooms and up to 10 participants in each. The Business plan, at $12.95/month, allows up to 40 rooms and 40 people per room. Their last plan, launching in March,  is designed for the SMB (Small to Medium Size Business) will offer additional features including access to their hosted full document management service. Update (May 2009): Inner Pass also offers a “Custom” service with the potential to host a webinar with hundreds of attendees, record calls and other features.

Over the past few weeks I have experienced a few sessions using InnerPass; the InnerPass  team has been very responsive to suggestions made for improvements, especially with respect to some speed issues that are now resolved. It now works reliably with both Skype 3.8 (still Skype’s latest release for general use) and Skype 4.0 Beta 3.

Since obtaining Skype Certification and its subsequent launch last fall, InnerPass has registered over 270,000 users (as shown in the graphic) growing virally amongst Skype users with little publicity. You can download via Tools | Do More | Get Skype Extras using Skype 3.8 or Tools | Extras | Get Skype Extras under Skype 4.0 for Windows beta 3. Normally it should show up as “InnerPass Share and Collaborate” under the “Sharing” category but until a bug is resolved by the Skype Extras team, you may find it as “Share, Collaborate, Communicate”.

InnerPass CEO Steve Parsloe has written a more detailed post for Skype’s Autumn 2008 Developer Newsletter. And in early December Steve along with his colleague Bill Trail, Vice-President, Business Development discussed InnerPass as a guest on SquawkBox.

As mentioned at the beginning, InnerPass’s Share and Collaborate service is a representative example of making Skype available anywhere there is an opportunity to benefit from real time conversations. Skype has enabled InnerPass to offer real time conversations to virtual meeting rooms incorporating file and desktop (or screen) sharing. And it brings large enterprise services down to a cost level such that any individual, mobile professional or small business can afford to benefit from a collaborative document management service.

Tags: InnerPass, Skype Extras, collaboration, file sharing, Skype, Steve Parsloe

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• Stealthing Skype into Larger Businesses (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype for Business: Building a Case Study Repository (voiceontheweb.biz)

OnState’s Virtual PBX incorporates Skype as a contributor to lower cost, yet more productive, small business communications management activities.

A mainstay for communications in any office with at least a few employees is the need to accept incoming calls, determine who is calling, what is their general need and getting the call to the right employee. In the interest of effective and productive customer and supplier relations, calls need an automated way to reach sales personnel, customer care, accounting  or technical support or “the boss”. Preferably this call management should be handled without any human intervention; over the past twenty or more years this has resulted in the evolution of increasingly effective Private Branch Exchange (“PBX”) offerings from telecomm equipment suppliers. And it traditionally required a reasonably demanding capital expense, from $15,000 up.

The basic functions of a PBX include:

• Receiving and answering a call from an external caller
• Offering a menu of options to determine to whom the call should be connected
• Transferring the call in response to answers provided either by entering alphanumeric or dialpad information or by using speech recognition.
• Accepting, recording and managing voice mails if nobody is available to take a call
• Ability to make a subsequent call transfer if deemed necessary

However, IP-based communications technology along with web 2.0 tools provide opportunities for enhancing the PBX to build more productive and effective business processes when it comes to managing relationships with both suppliers and customers. For instance:

• An individual agent portal for overall conversation management
• Intelligent call queuing would permit an “occupied” employee to either put a caller into a queue for answering when available or transfer a caller to another employee with the skills to handle the call
• Chat sessions can be offered as either an alternative or complement to voice conversations
• Building a searchable call archive integrated into an email system such as GMail.
• Making call transfer destinations independent of the recipient’s geographical location, whether “in the office”, at a home office or out “on the road”.
• Reducing and minimizing the costs associated with various PBX services.

Building on its Call Center experience OnState has launched its Virtual PBX which provides all this functionality as well as:

• Receives calls via Skype, SkypeIn as well as Local DID numbers and toll free numbers in over 20 countries
• Call transfer to employees, agents and other designated recipients on their Skype-enabled PC, landline phones or mobile independent of geographical location
• An extension-based agent/employee/representative portal for managing incoming calls, including call waiting notification, queuing and redirection
• Integration into GMail, Zimbra and Salesforce.com

A few weeks ago, OnState CEO Pat Kelly was our guest on a SquawkBox conference call where he provided more details about OnState’s Virtual PBX, including a sharable slide show presentation accessible as a Google document.

Bottom line; for as little as $15 per month per seat and no capital investment, small to medium enterprises and organizations as well can establish an enhanced PBX capability to facilitate both more productive business processes as well as more cost effective communications.

Definitely a business model disrupter.

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Over the past ten years Orlando, FL-based Voxeo Corporation has grown to become one of the largest hosts of enterprise Interactive Voice Response (“IVR”) applications, building not only tools for developing and hosting these applications but also a track record of twenty profitable quarters as a self-financed private company.

Historically Voxeo has provided, at no charge, resources for C++/Java and Web Developers to produce customized IVR applications that are then hosted at their network operations center. Their developer community has grown to over 31,000 participants. As their expertise has grown they have also developed their licensable Prophecy SIP platform for those enterprises that wish to host their own services using Voxeo’s tools.

Today Voxeo announced an expansion their development expertise, technology base and user community through the acquisition of Germany-based Voice Objects.

While acquiring ownership of Voice Objects’ technology assets, Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor emphasized in an interview with me yesterday that Voxeo’s first reason for making an acquisition is to acquire the expertise and professionalism of the employees. Contrary to the popular perception of making an acquisition and focusing on the technology assets, Voxeo looks for team players who can fit into Voxeo’s culture and then look at the technology synergies.

As a bonus the Voice Objects acquisition brings to the table as customers a new layer of developers; namely those who routinely develop “self-service” applications for service providers and enterprises as a full time occupation. Jonathan described Voxeo’s current developer resources as having two layers: API-based telephony libraries favored by C++/Java “low level” developers and  XML-based telephony languages using Voxeo’s proprietary but simplified VoiceXML as well as other XML standards for web developers. The acquisition of Voice Ojbects introduces a higher level of object-based telephony tools, employing drag-and-drop and visual rapid development techniques.

Whereas Voxeo’s legacy tools facilitated people-to-people connections, Voice Ojbects’ toolkits facilitate the development of “self-service” applications where no human is involved in delivering or provisioning enterprise or carrier-based services.  It is multimodal in that not only is voice involved but also SMS messaging and video can be brought into the application where appropriate. For example, T-Mobile Czech can easily program changes into their self-service applications reducing development times by an order of magnitude while dynamically addressing market needs.

Taylor described Voice Objects’ toolkits as having three major components: a rich development environment, unified self-service middleware – that connects customer information within an enterprise with customers who desire access to this information via voice, SMS or other modes – and, finally, extensive analytics. The analytics component gathers real customer usage data and provides justification for making application modifications based on user experiences as well as changing local market conditions. To quote Jonathan: “Business owners don’t want to build a bad experience; however, it is challenging and difficult to build applications that work well for customers.”

In closing our interview, Taylor mentioned that Voxeo, recognizing that the best way to recruit talent is through acquisitions of this nature, will be looking at three or four similar acquisitions in 2009 building up a team of “great people who understand the industry well”.

The acquisition of Voice Objects will not change Voxeo’s business model of making their developer resources available at no charge while charging either for hosting of applications or for platform licenses sold to enterprises that wish to host their own applications.

It appears that Voxeo continues to set a benchmark for operating a sustainably profitable business in the Voice 2.0 world. On a broader scale Jonathan has provided an overview of the various levels of developer segmentation and classes of tools available on the market today for creating Voice 2.0 applications.

Other posts on this acquistion:

• Vox Populi “Best Freaking Voice Platform on the Market”.
• Dan York at Voxeo: What the Voice Objects Acquistion by Voxeo means for voice applications developers.
• Michael Dinan, TMCNet: Voxeo Acquires VoiceObjects, Expands Cost-Saving IVR Solutions
• Andy Abramson, VoIP Watch: What’s New In VoIP? Lots with Gizmo, Voxeo and Fonality

Tags: Voxeo, Voice Objects. Jonathan Taylor, acquisitions