Skype will offer new features for businesses but it won't develop a specific VoIP product for the workplace, Niklas Zennstrom, founder and CEO of Skype, said on Tuesday at the VON Europe conference in Stockholm.
Skype already has some capabilities geared toward business users, such as a feature that lets multiple users share an account to pay for services. Some of Skype's partnerships, with companies such as headset maker Plantronics and others, are also geared toward business users too, Zennstrom said.
"We will continue to bring out features useful to business users. What we've not done is an enterprise-wide solution, and that's not our intention," he said.
About 30% of Skype's customers use the service for business, he said.
Questions about security have led some businesses to ban Skype, and some vendors even offer applications to block it. The company is trying to do a better job communicating about its security, Zennstrom said.
Some companies ban Skype because they don't understand that calls are encrypted and quite secure, according to Zennstrom. Oxford University in the United Kingdom banned it, but when Skype contacted the university and explained how the security behind it works, Oxford lifted the ban, he said.
Skype could become increasingly useful to business users who want to cut down on mobile phone calls. Skype already works on Windows Mobile devices, and the company continues to develop a Skype client compatible with Symbian, the operating system that fuels Nokia smart-phones, Zennstrom said.
Only 4% of broadband subscribers in the United States are registered Skype users, the CEO said. He hopes the world will follow some of the Scandinavian countries, which tend to be early adopters and avid users of technologies such mobile telecommunications and broadband. A fifth of broadband users in Finland are registered Skype users, and in Sweden 17% are registered Skype users, he said.
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