The Skype, Citrix Partnership

In a keynote address at Enterprise Connect 2011 in Orlando, Skype announced a partnering agreement with Citrix and their Go-To meeting capability for enterprise customers. By integrating the GoToMeeting into their enterprise collaboration solution, Skype will compete against larger corporate collaboration tools like Cisco, HP, Microsoft, and IBM. For Skype, it’s clear that they want to move beyond being a casual VoIP service into becoming a robust enterprise solution provider. This service is expected to be introduced by the end of 2011- no pricing was mentioned.

The intent is for Skype business users to quickly set up online audio conferencing meetings that users can join via Skype (VoIP) or through the public switched telephone network (PSTN). As both Skype and Citrix currently offer audio conferencing, when asked which audio capability will be implemented, Skype’s David Gurlé, VP Skype Enterprise, said it will embed Skype’s SILK audio codec. (As a sidebar, this is rather interesting as Citrix gets high marks for their clarity conferencing). The partnership will enable interactive screen sharing whereby meeting hosts can easily walk through, annotate and highlight whatever they would like to show on their computer screen, such as a presentations or demonstrations.

For the layman, it’s a good offering when you’re in the office and trying to contain costs. You will no longer need to setup separate Skype and GoToMeeting sessions for audio, video and group screen share respectively. This isn’t an earth-shattering new capability for users, but it does make it simpler in trying to reduce costs with web conferencing. The intent is to offer an integrated capability to the small and medium size business users that currently cannot justify the current $500+ yearly cost of GoToMeetings from Citrix- although with no pricing, it begs the question how price conscious this is.

Skype is clearly going after enterprise. I mentioned in a November blog that Skype is a ‘sleeping giant’- and this is another indication of their true plans for getting out of a consumer commodity. In their IPO filing (which has now been pushed out to sometime this year), Skype detailed their plans for going after the enterprise market for monthly recurring revenues. They have been building steadily on their products and for going after business, including mobile users. Back to this partnership with Citrix, for people who need web conferencing to do their business, this seems like an elegant solution. I just don’t quite understand why they announced this now when it won’t be ready till the end of the year; to me, this is real advanced selling.