Marguerite Reardon has a good article on CNet about Cisco's issuance of $4 billion worth of bonds, and what Cisco likely intends to do with the money. Speculation has turned to potential acquisitions, most of them outside the communications space, with the exception of one eye-catching name: Skype.Personally, I'm very skeptical of the idea that Cisco would buy Skype. The only reasoning that makes any sense to me is that Skype technology could form an element of Cisco's consumer communications/social media strategy, maybe the voice component of social media or lower-end consumer-grade "telepresence." Or potentially maybe Cisco could step in and essentially become the telco of the future.
Other than that, Cisco wouldn't seem to have a lot of incentive to want to commoditize voice, certainly not for the enterprise. Cisco's cruising as the market leader in IP-PBXs, and is racking up some nice high-margin IP phone sales. I don't see any reason for them to let Skype technology anywhere near the business market, if Cisco acquired said technology.
But a discussion of how Cisco would view Skype opens up a broader topic that is coming, sometime in the future: Where is Cisco going with voice in the enterprise?
Cisco has placed big, well publicized bets on Telepresence and on Web-based multimedia (in the form of WebEx). Telepresence seems to be paying off and playing perfectly into the current business climate that demands an ROI story for every technology. WebEx in its legacy form is successful, but Cisco clearly intends more for the platform, and has announced as much, but that remains a future prospect.
For the near term, Cisco's bread and butter in communications is the Unified Communications Manger (UCM), its IP-PBX, together with the phones that hang off that IP-PBX.
That means that whatever comes after the PBX threatens Cisco as much as it threatens Avaya or Nortel or Siemens or anyone else. More so, since Cisco is the PBX market leader now. It means that if voice stops being a high-value, high-touch, highly specialized application--in a word, if it becomes commoditized--that's bad for Cisco. And what is Skype if not the commoditization of voice?
In fact, Skype's technology is a technically-incompatible but conceptually similar model to Cisco's arch-enemy in communications, Microsoft: Put the horsepower in the endpoint, damn the network impairments, full speed ahead.
Cisco is emphasizing the services-based WebEx Connect model precisely because it keeps voice as part of a high-value, high-function platform that sits in the center of the network--in fact, it's even more centralized than the UCM IP-PBX, since it sits in a public network, which I understand some people are calling the "cloud" nowadays.
Of course, Microsoft is making its own concessions to reality, beefing up Office Communications Server Release 2 with traditional PBX features like attendant console, while also pushing OCS-based conferencing for the ROI story.
Voice could be commoditized for the enterprise in two ways: Either the Skype model could take hold, in which case users and enterprises trade inconsistent quality and connectivity for free connectivity. Or voice could essentially migrate out of the enterprise network altogether and onto the public cellular network, and the enterprise call control exists only to direct calls back and forth between the mobile operators and LAN-connected softphones. I'm not saying there'd be no voice traffic on enterprise networks, only that the predominance of cellular calling would drive the value of voice down to such a low level that it wouldn't be worth doing anything more than running it on the LAN/WAN to PC softphones/UC dashboards.
Everybody does the same thing when they enter this market. They say their product has everything the previous generations had, and if they lack any features, you don't need those anyway. Then they start filling in those missing features. Cisco did it; Microsoft's doing it to a certain degree. They then have a vested interest in voice not becoming "just another application on the network."
