Skype Enters Small Business VoIP Market

Telecom News Editorials Reports Glossary

2:36 pm on March 9, 2006 | Category: Business, VoIP, Telecom Services

Skype has taken aggressive step into the small business market today, by officially unveiling Skype for Business, a dedicated service aimed at small businesses with newer than 10 employees.

The free internet telephony provider has been launching more and more business-oriented features for the past several months, after discovering just how popular the Skype service is among small enterprise customers.

About 30% of Skype’s users are currently using the service for business purposes, and unlike users of the free PC-to-PC component, the majority of enterprise users are willing to pay for enhanced features. An impressive 97% of them are SkypeOut subscribers, allowing them to make cheap local and long distance calls to landline or mobile phone numbers.

A large portion of business customers also pay for the SkypeIn service, which allows them to have special phone numbers for their computers, and accept calls from landline and mobile phones. About 31% of customers who use the Skype service for business list SkypeIn phone numbers on their business cards.

The new business service will provide extra incentive for businesses to sign-up by allowing administrators to centralize call management functions, and use a single control panel to top up all of the paid Skype accounts within a company.

By offering this kind of advanced functionality, the eBay-owned Skype is clearly trying to expand its reach within the business market, which could help to greatly boost paid subscriptions and revenues from the service.