Skype to create new products for business

Today Skype has filed an IPO registration statement and plans to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering. Along with the IPO application Skype has published some of the their business stats and plan of its further development. It turnes out that the company is doing quite well. During the first 6 months in 2010 Skype has earned $406 million, that is approximately 25% higher the previous year. Nevertheless, taking into account that the Skype has already more than 560 million registered users (it's more than Facebook), the company's management wants to earn at least ten times more. In addition, they are worried that almost 90% of Skipe's income comes from a single service - SkypeOut. Therefore, the major objective of attracting new investments is the development of new paid of business applications.

What will be those new business apps - is unknown yet. Skype currently offers 2 business products (except the SkypeOut): Skype Manager (the control panel that allows to create employee accounts, pay for them and whatch the statistics) and Skype Connect (the service that allows to integrate Skype with the corporate IP-PBX system). Recently it turned out that Skype has agreed with Cisco and ShoreTel that these PBX suppliers will resell Skype Connect to their customers.

Also, soon to Skype will add group videoconferencing (for 5 persons), which are mainly intended for business and will be a paid service. It's # likely that after the videoconferencing Skype will also add web-conferencing tools to compete with Webex and GoToMeeting. As you know, Skype already provides screen-sharing tool, but it has very basic functionality and only supports one-to-one meetings.

Another possible business product from Skype could be Skype Connect extension for mobile users - the system similar to Blackberry, which enables mobile users access data and services in the enterprise Skype-account. For example, the ability to sync contact list, chat history, access voicemail on the server.

But the most interesting business application that Skype may create - is a virtual PBX - a system that allows to link a local number, set rules of processing incoming calls, set up a voice menu and control the the internal calls in the company. Such service would allow small businesses to operate phone calls without buying and maintaining a traditional PBX device or software.

In addition, on top of such PBX service Skype could built a platform for voice applications and earn license fees just like Salesforce, Apple and Google.

See also: Top 10 VoIP services