Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Dan York tipped me off to the fact that the Skype team has quietly released a beta version for enteprise customers.  First hinted at by Jonathan Christensen at VON Berlin last week, this version appears to be identical to the consumer 3.0 product, with added enterprise management features:

Business friendly features

• Includes Windows Installer (commonly known as MSI).
• Increased security for business users.
• Easy deployment to multiple machines in your company.
• More control for IT administrators.
• Manage multiple accounts with the Business Control Panel.

Depending on whether you’re an IT administrator or not, these are either a huge deal, or a big yawn.  MSI makes it easier to install and uninstall on corporate networks, for instance.  The product strategy, however, is smart.  Make sure the administrators and IT tycoons have their objections dealt with, and then the rollout can proceed smoothly.

Once again, Skype’s PR strategy mystifies me.  Where are the talking points, fact sheets, press releases, call-downs to bloggers?

Strike two for SparkPR.  Three strikes, you’re out?

Dan York has written a lengthy post on how SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Insitute has identified VoIP among their top 20 Internet Security Threats for 2006.  They’ve identified six major trends in Internet security attacks, and VoIP is one of them, primarily via vulnerabilities in systems like Asterisk and Cisco Call Manager. 

It’s a first, apparently. 

Jim Courtney is systematically demolishing SparkPR’s inept handling of the Skype 3.0 Beta release.  Check out his two postings over on Skype Journal:

1. Skype PR Wake-Up Call 1: The Issue, in which he provides example after example of the hugely mixed messages that the blogosphere delivered about the Skype 3.0 beta. No press release was circulated prior to the announcement, and most people (myself included) didn’t know it was coming.  Tipped off the day before, I found out the contents and release date the old fashioned way — by calling people (on Skype, of course).  As a result, I wrote about the stuff that mattered to me: the call transfer functionality.
2. Skype PR Wake-Up Call 2: The Solution, in which he outlines how blogging and the internet have changed PR.  The basic message?  A beta is your launch.  Better have your messaging ducks in a row by the beta.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s posting, where Jim will outline what might have happened if the PR team had taken the approach he’s suggesting.

The Skype team should be embarrassed by (a) the fact that Jim, a prominent commentator on Skype at a publication called the Skype Journal, had to pry the press release out of their PR agency hours before the announcement and (b) the fact that he is now having to teach their agency how to do its job.

My advice?  Fire SparkPR and get someone who knows what they’re doing.

For the Internet Telephony Magazine 100th Issue, Greg Galitzine asked all of the “Top 100 Influencers” to write 150 words on the the impact of IP Communications.  I couldn’t help myself… I wrote a little over 300.   Here it is, in case you missed it, in all it’s unvarnished glory.

IP Communications, in and of itself, is fundamentally uninteresting.  There.  I said it.  Heresy, right?  But really, who cares whether the packets on your network are encoded using IP or some other scheme. 

A packet is a packet is a packet.

The dawn of IP communications has ushered in a period where networks and applications are converging, all around the IP standard.  It’s forced us all to confront very basic questions – do I need that many phone numbers, email addresses, IM handles?  Why should there be so many bills for so many services?  Why isn’t my voice mail accessible from my email box?

As regulators have made rules allowing for increased competition, networks have started to disaggregate, just as computers did 30 years ago.  In 1970, a computer was a monolithic, vertically integrated solution.  It was expensive.  Software was expensive too.  Fast forward 15 years to 1985, and suddenly microcomputers built from commodity components were everywhere.  And computing was cheap, and becoming cheaper all the time.

Today’s networks are going the same.  Want to set up a phone company?  Get yourself an application server (a PC running Asterisk is probably a good start), outsource your connectivity and DIDs, and you’re in business. 

So, just as commodity PC’s ushered in an era of personal computing, driven by the applications that you and I wanted to use on the PC, and not the ones placed on the computer by the tyrants in the IT department, commodity networks are going to usher in an era of personal communications services.  We’ll pick and choose applications and services that we want to use, from the providers that we want to buy from.  We won’t have 10 email addresses, 3 voice mail boxes, 5 phone numbers, and 8 bills. And you know what? The tyrants at Ma Bell will be powerless to stop us.

And that’s what IP Communications is all about.  Me.