Two years ago, Mark Ehr and a few co-workers began using Skype Ltd. to communicate between Proxima Technology's Denver headquarters and its offices in Sydney, Australia, and Windsor, England. "I'd spent hours talking to Sydney," says Ehr, director of product marketing at the 70-person software company. Luxembourg-based Skype's peer-to-peer voice-over-IP software routes calls over the public Internet, offers good voice quality and supports conference calls -- and it's free, he says.

Soon, top executives began using Skype for internal calls. "That set the tone for the rest of the company," Ehr says, and today Skype is the primary means of making intracompany calls at Proxima. Skype has also allowed Proxima to put off a planned migration to an internal VOIP telephony system.

Driven by convenience and potential cost savings, Skype and other consumer-focused public peer-to-peer calling networks have been quietly gaining ground in businesses, to the delight of some and the chagrin of others. While such public calling networks can cut costs, administrators must also sort through the management, compliance and security implications.

That needs to happen fast. As with public instant messaging services, peer-to-peer VOIP has taken root with consumers, who are increasingly using the programs at work. "Services like Skype are indeed coming into enterprises, brought in by users much in the same way IM services were brought in years ago," says Irwin Lazar, an analyst at Burton Group. Currently, some 30 percent of Skype clients use the service for business calls, says Will Stofega, an analyst at IDC.

Skype and programs such as Microsoft Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger With Voice combine instant messaging and file-transfer capabilities with voice- and videoconferencing capabilities, integrating those into a single, proprietary soft client on the desktop. Contact lists are built by sharing user IDs in the same fashion as instant messaging "buddy lists". Most programs can only call users that have the same client, although a few, such as Gizmo, are more open.

Users particularly like the ability to see whether a person is online before initiating a call, says Lazar. "Voice mail is cumbersome and annoying. It's a lot nicer if you can avoid voice mail by sharing presence information," he says.

Skype, which claims more than 100 million registered users, established an early lead in public VOIP calling. It has traditionally offered the best voice quality, although it faces increasing competition. Skype was also the first to offer value-added services to connect VOIP callers to the public switched telephone network (SkypeOut) and to allow users to buy a local telephone number that PSTN users can call to reach a Skype soft phone (SkypeIn). "Skype is successful because it just works. ... It is easy to use and seamlessly traverses network address translation [devices] and firewalls," says Jeff Pulver, chairman and founder of Pulvermedia, which offers the competing Free World Dialup.

The advantages of peer-to-peer VOIP go beyond just cost savings, says Stofega. "From a consumer perspective, it's a price game, but from a business perspective, it's evolved into an application, a tool that can help business

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine