VOIP and SIP News

Enterprise managers who want to use Voice over Internet Protocol as a hosted solution may look nervously at the recent problems faced by Skype, according to Information Week.

Despite being bought out by technology giant Microsoft in a vast $8.5 billion deal, a recent outage meant many Skype users were unable to log into their accounts or make phone calls.

Although the rapidly resolved problem was put down to a software glitch, it will make enterprises think twice about using the commercial version of Skype for VoIP calls and video conferencing.

Whatever the size of business, companies can ill afford communications breakdowns such as this one and dropped calls and poor service can lead to a decrease in revenue, or even worse an altoghether failure to land a big contract.

Customers need confidence in the enterprise and that can only be gained through a secure and reliable unified communications infrastructure.

Darrel Bowman, the CEO of mynetworkcompany.com, said: "As we become more reliant on overall basic business functions, cloud-based applications, and storage, IT service providers need to vet cloud partners more thoroughly. This is done to ensure that they actually have the necessary redundancy for a cloud offering to be successful in the long-term."

It is therefore unlikely that Microsoft will let Skype fail and it has big plans for the service, giving it its own division within Microsoft and hoping to use it with devices such as the Windows Phone 7.

While Skype outages may be accepted on a free service that it used by consumers, they certainly will not be tolerated in a business capacity.