Skype Releases Video Conferencing

UC

Continuing this week’s video theme, Skype is launching a beta of its forthcoming group video conferencing chat service. This offering will allow up to five simultaneous participants, finally allowing Skype to compete with fee-based services such as Logitech’s SightSpeed (supporting up to nine participants) , ooVoo (up to six participants) and Apple’s free iChat AV, supporting up to 4 participants.

We continue to see Skype as an enterprise enigma. A large percentage of our research participants tell us that they are aware of Skype usage within their companies, though few officially support it. Many continue to express reservations around Skype’s security model and the lack of centralized control of Skype accounts. Meanwhile, Skype continues to broaden its enterprise offerings via the beta of its “Skype for SIP” SIP trunking initiative and a growing number of partnerships with mainstream IP telephony and UC vendors including ShoreTel. Skype also continues to gain mindshare among consumers, leading to growing demand from end-users for Skype access from their work machines. Often we hear stories from IT managers who tell us that their own lack of company-wide UC solutions has led their employees to rely on Skype for instant messaging, voice, and some video.

With its 5-way conferencing option Skype provides a new opportunity for workgroups to use video to augment their collaboration capabilities, and creates new potential problems for network managers concerned about the bandwidth impact of desktop video conferencing. While Skype isn’t the first to bring desktop-based group video conferencing to the market, it’s presence and user population means that its offering has far more potential for adoption. IT managers need to proactively address both the potential for Skype’s impact on their network, and the opportunity that Skype offers for low-cost group video conferencing to meet the needs for improving collaboration for virtual workers.