UC
Skype’s recent outage demonstrates the challenges enterprise IT managers face in leveraging consumer services to reduce telecom costs and/or improve flexibility. While few companies exclusively rely on Skype as their primary voice/UC service, many IT leaders tell us they allow or even encourage Skype use, especially to reduce long distance charges and/or support mobile workers.
Skype does offer a set of business services, primarily designed to simplify account management and billing for corporate customers, but it lacks the level of customer support offered by larger hosted voice/UC providers. In addition, Skype’s architecture relies on “supernodes,” unmanaged consumer clients, to forward calls between users. Skype notes that one of the approaches it used to mitigate the recent outage was to introduce Skype-managed “mega-supernodes” to replace those public nodes that had failed.
Enterprise IT managers should evaluate consumer services to reduce costs and improve flexibility, but don’t rely on them as your sole means of communications. Meanwhile, evaluate business-focused services designed to reduce costs and improve flexibility via hosted service delivery models.
