Skype Gaining Popularity In Business

Two years ago, Mark Ehr and a few co-workers began using Skype to communicate between Proxima Technology’s Denver headquarters and its offices in Sydney, Australia, and Windsor, England. “I’d spent hours talking to Sydney,� says Ehr, director of product marketing at the 70-person software company. Luxembourg-based Skype’s peer-to-peer voice-over-IP software routes calls over the public Internet, offers good voice quality and supports conference calls — and it’s free, he says.

Soon, top executives began using Skype for internal calls. “That set the tone for the rest of the company,� Ehr says, and today Skype is the primary means of making intracompany calls at Proxima. Skype has also allowed Proxima to put off a planned migration to an internal VOIP telephony system.

Driven by convenience and potential cost savings, Skype and other consumer-focused public peer-to-peer calling networks have been quietly gaining ground in businesses, to the delight of some and the chagrin of others. While such public calling networks can cut costs, administrators must also sort through the management, compliance and security implications.

Macworld: News: Skype slips into business