Cloud, consumers give Skype enterprise boost

Speaking to ZDNet Asia Thursday on the sidelines of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) SME Summit held here, Dan Neary, Skype's Asia-Pacific vice president and general manager, pointed out that consumer or online applications were in the past "judged as not being business grade".

"Today, what's fascinating is the Web has simply been rebranded as cloud computing," he noted. "And now suddenly it is not only business grade, it has become...secure enough that you trust [it with] your user information, confidential business aspects--you're trusting that to online applications."

Skype recently took steps to meet the needs of enterprise users, said Neary. It built configuration capabilities into its enterprise offering for IT managers, particularly to cater to various levels of security controls--for instance, the option to disable file sharing. Another area of enhancement was in the area of billing, providing unified credits for allocation to employees instead of having users file expense claims for their individual SkypeOut credits.

The company also supports SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), currently still in beta, which allows businesses to use their existing IP-based (Internet Protocol) phones to make Skype calls. The service, he noted, is compatible with products from Cisco Systems, Nortel and ShoreTel.

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