Skype to buy Gizmo5 and deploy SIP/Jabber?

Skype, that is struggling now against Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, has  two backup plans. The first - is to rebuild the back end themselves, and the second - is to acquire some existing technology. It turn out, that Skype moves in both directions. The company is hiring VoIP experts (like crazy) for their internal project, named Gecko. But this project is probably not progressing as quickly as Skype needs it to. Today multiple sources announced that Skype is in negotiations to acquire its little rival Gizmo5, that uses open protocols SIP and Jabber in its p2p VoIP network. The price tag is said to be in the $50 million range.

It's interesting that Gizmo5 has got its popularity thanks to imaginary competition with Skype. Gizmo5 founder/CEO, Michael Robertson, has taken every opportunity to take swipes at Skype, trying to convince one and all that his SIP-based service was better than Skype. Nevertheless, Gizmo's user base is now approximately 100 times smaller than Skype's one.



(Michael Robertson)

Except this small drop to user base and back end VoIP technology, Skype has two more reasons to buy Gizmo5. First is OpenSky (service by Gizmo5, that enables SIP-to-Skype and Skype-to-SIP calls) that proves Gizmo developers' expertise in Skype technology. Second, Gizmo's partnership with Google Voice for SIP-to-PSTN calls. This tandem is quite dangerous for Skype market share.

Of course, Skype's move to SIP/Jabber sounds very exciting - it's a promise for the global VoIP interoperability. But it will be a very difficult project for Skype. It would cost a lot of money and developer efforts to redesign Skype network. Besides, unlike Skype technology, SIP isn’t able to do all calls over P2P and produces high load on provider's servers. This will obviously reduce the service reliability. Moreover, SIP requires faster internet speed and often has problems with firewall - that are the problems, that Skype users can face with.

See also: Top 10 VoIP services