* Take note: It’s not capable of serving enterprises
As you’ve probably read ad nauseam, Skype had a major outage affecting users for about two days last week. Complaints are soaring across bulletin boards and blogs on the Web about the outage, which Skype says was caused by the high volume of logins when computers automatically rebooted after installing updates from Microsoft.
Though I understand the frustration among those trying to use the service, I have little sympathy for anyone who bet their corporate telecom policy or even parts of it on Skype.
I read about some angry IT and network managers saying their plans to integrate Skype into corporate telecom were on hold indefinitely. And I’ve talked to numerous IT decision-makers in the past two years contemplating whether to use Skype in a more formal way (recognizing their employees use Skype on the sly).
With or without this outage, Skype is in no way capable of providing enterprise-grade services. Where is the 24/7 enterprise customer service? Management portal? Integration with corporate telephony gear? Non-proprietary security? Service-level agreements (SLA)? Skype hasn’t built its service for enterprises, so business users shouldn’t be upset when it doesn’t meet expectations. You get what you pay (or don’t pay) for.
Indeed, businesses must be clear on their expectations. If they want to use Skype – either to save money or provide global calling capabilities for mobile and remote workers – that’s fine! They just shouldn’t expect the reliability and performance they would get from AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Telstra, or Verizon.
This outage also underscores potential problems moving forward with VoIP. It’s still a relatively new technology, and the potential masses haven’t even begun to use the Web for phone calls. Skype has roughly 5 million customers making calls over the public Internet. As more businesses turn to hosted VoIP services (from carriers who do offer SLAs), it’s imperative for carriers to protect against this problem emerging again.
For branch offices, hosted VoIP services make a lot of sense, since IT staffs can offload the management of the voice communications system to a third party. But don’t rely upon a company that can’t offer the basic enterprise support structure – unless you’re willing to put up with problems (such as this outage).
