TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is reporting that Cisco has made an offer to buy Skype. Arrington says that the deal would have to be in the $5 billion range, since that's what Skype is hoping to raise with the IPO that it has filed for. A Cisco purchase would, of course, short-circuit the IPO process.
If Arrington's report is accurate, we could have a very interesting situation on our hands. Given Google's rollout last week of a Skype-targeting VOIP service (integrated with Gmail), Cisco would seem to be taking Google seriously as a UC rival. And when Cisco sees a rival in a market it covets, it tends to go big; buying Skype would certainly consititute "going big."
Skype would actually be a pretty good fit for Cisco, in a lot of ways. The cutting edge for Skype is desktop video, and who's more interested in driving desktop video and its resulting bandwidth consumption than Cisco? Cisco's been predicting huge increases in video bandwidth consumption, and Skype could be a good avenue for making that happen.
There's also some important Cisco DNA in Skype--most significantly, Skype's chief technology strategist is Jonathan Rosenberg, who came over from Cisco and is one of the authors of the crucial Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Technology strategy in general and SIP in particular would presumably be critical to any integration Cisco wanted to do with Skype.
In fact, Skype is chock-full of industry veterans lured from leading vendors. Another SIP guru now helping lead Skype is David Gurle, who serves as VP and GM of the Skype for Business line, and who founded Microsoft's Real-time Communications division and led it in the pre-OCS days.
The Avaya connection for Skype comes via Charles Giancarlo, who serves on Skype's board as a representative of Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owns Skype and is taking it public--and which also is co-owner of Avaya. Giancarlo served as interim CEO of Avaya before the vendor hired current CEO Kevin Kennedy.
So this makes you wonder: Could we see a bidding war for Skype? If Google has essentially validated the market for Internet telephony clients, Skype is clearly the prize: It has twice the number of users as Gmail (roughly 300 million and possibly more, versus about 150 million Gmail users who now have the Google Voice client automatically included in their interface).
Could Avaya go toe to toe with Cisco in a bidding war for Skype? Who else might get in? Microsoft? IBM? Oracle? If the bidding starts at $5 billion, would Gores Group be able to make a play, in hopes of adding Skype to its Siemens Enterprise stable?
Arrington reports that Google was also interested in Skype but was scared off by anti-trust concerns, which would seem well-founded to me.
This could be an interesting week.
Update: Go read Dave Michels' analysis over at Pin Drop Soup--some really great points about the fairly limited options Skype faces--IPO market being weak, and other buyers likely not up to the $5 billion price tag. The only thing I'd take issue with Dave on is that I think there could be room for a big player from the non-PBX world to swoop in on Skype--a Microsoft or an IBM. As a PDS commenter points out, Skype is to a great extent a carrier/cloud play, and both Microsoft and IBM are moving that way. IBM especially could position Skype Connect within the vendor-agnostic vision of Sametime Unified Telephony, in contrast to the likely push away from Skype that would happen among competing vendors if Cisco bought it.
