It was ironic that Cisco petitioned the European Commission to take another look at the Microsoft-Skype merger, on the same day that Microsoft's CFO, Peter Klein, was speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference about, among other things, the path forward for Skype.
The bottom-line from this talk was that Microsoft does indeed have plans to integrate Lync and Skype; but delving into the transcript of the conference, there's an interesting comparison that Klein makes.
Before getting to this comparison, Klein notes that, just a few months into the acquisition, "we haven't talked [publicly] too much about the product integration," though he promises, "we will." He talks about Skype in the context of Microsoft's entire line of premises systems, from XBox Live to Lync, and says that Skype, "really ties together all of our devices with a scenario that's probably as universal as any."
At that point, Klein's interviewer, Heather Bellini, asks, "Is Skype being integrated in Office as powerful as when SharePoint was integrated into Office?" and Klein replies, "I think that's probably a pretty good way to think about it."
I'll admit that's the first time I've heard that comparison in the nine months since the deal was announced; maybe it was in some of the analysis, but the emphasis has generally, and rightly, been focused on the match between Lync and Skype. But when you think about the big picture, it does make sense. And given how phenomenally successful SharePoint was, it's a comparison that wouldn't bode well for Microsoft's competitors.
We're always talking about some form of "convergence" in our industry--something is always converging with something else. I think we're getting to the point where basically all the modalities of collaboration are doing some converging--messaging, real-time voice and video, content management--and adding SharePoint to your picture of the system Microsoft is building for collaboration rounds out the picture.
As much as the EC filing pits Cisco against Microsoft, I still think there's a big element of Google to watch in this--and also, at least in terms of thought leadership, IBM as well. At Lotusphere last month, IBM talked about using its latest version of its Connections social platform as your central interface to all you collaboration, but they also pitched that, if you don't want to go with Connections, at least not yet, you can still use Notes/Sametime as this main interface, supported by systems including IBM Docs, the company's answer to Google Docs.
Skype plus SharePoint could give Microsoft an outside-the-firewall collaboration play that touches all these bases; Klein was asked about enhancing Skype security, and he was clearly not ready to be too specific, but he said, "we're working hard on the product integration not only with Lync, but with all the other products." Such a full integration could give Microsoft an enterprise-grade play against Google's more consumer-level suite of document collaboration plus messaging plus voice and video.
As Peter Klein noted, Microsoft has been pretty quiet about Skype's role up to now. It looks like we'll be starting to hear more, and bigger, plans in the months ahead.
