Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Amongst folks in the PBX industry, the most common criticism of Skype is that it’s not a great business tool.  People cite the lack of common business features — queues, call transfer capability, and so on — as evidence.  Fascinatingly, Skype for Business ignores this criticism, and instead focuses on consolidated billing.  Smart move!  Increasingly, we’re seeing Skype use in all kinds of organizations, with the current feature set.  As a replacement for conference calls, for instance, it’s superb.

The Skype for Business dashboard allows an administrator to manage multiple Skype accounts, and consolidate all of the bills under one organizational umbrella.  Sign-up is free.  For organizations where Skype is already present to some degree, this is a no-brainer.

Most interesting of all are the strategy implications.  The grass-roots marketing campaign waged by Skype must be paying dividends, else why build a tool for IT managers?