David Gurlé's task when he took the Enterprise Connect stage Tuesday afternoon was to prove his opening assertion: "Skype Means Business."
Obviously that's not something you can fully accomplish in the 45 minutes that Gurlé was allotted, but he offered a few proof points, chief among which is a just-announced partnership with Citrix to offer web conferencing powered by GoToMeeting, Citrix's conferencing functionality as part of Skype. Gurlé brought out Brett Caine, SVP and general manager of Citrix's Online Services Division, to join in the announcement.
Another element of the strategy: Gurlé addressed, head-on and early in his talk, the major outage that Skype suffered last December, an event sure to give anyone pause if they'd been considering Skype as a mission-critical service. Gurlé called this a "very humbling experience," and said that to ensure it's not repeated, Skype will itself host the "supernodes" that power its services; in the past, elements within Skype's peer-to-peer mesh network could be used as supernodes as well as clients.
Finally, Gurlé said that Skype would offer 24X7 support with SLAs for its enterprise services.
Gurlé also mentioned Skype's partnership with Avaya as another proof point of his company's move into the enterprise--though he didn't delve into great detail on this point.
Skype clearly needs to find additional revenue sources if it's to complete its IPO, which looks to be delayed to the second half of this year. Gurlé didn't offer up a lot of specifics on how it would use Enterprise services to help in this effort, and when pressed by Enterprise Connect GM Fred Knight during the Q&A period, Gurlé alluded to the potential for introducing unspecified "subscription services."
The bottom line is that Skype is a fact of life for many enterprises today, whether network decision-makers approve or even know about it. Gurlé insisted that since all traffic on Skype is encrypted, it's a secure service, but many enterprises need governance and compliance controls and are rightly concerned about how to bring Skype under this umbrella, now that it's already out there on users' laptops.
On the other hand, Skype is undoubtedly also saving companies (literally) untold millions of dollars as travelers and other remote workers use the free calling to avoid expensive carrier bills, especially in international travel.
Skype is positioned to be a significant player for enterprise voice and video, and David Gurlé's Enteprise Connect keynote was a key move in that positioning.
(You can get David Gurlé's own report on his keynote at Skype's internal blog here.)
