I don’t want to sound like I’m skype-bashing. I’m not. Skype is the star that has shown us the path while VoIP was astray in the desert. But as I told Bernie Skype just isn’t suitable for the corporate environment, for three reasons – no one will guarantee to fix it for you if it breaks; Skype won’t tell you how it works; you just can’t control it.

Denis Bergstrom has written a detailed paper about this issue.

There are other more commercial reasons for a corporate not to deal with Skype. Principally: the company isn’t really interested in corporate business; there’s no clear roadmap for corporate product development; and most damning of all, there are no open standards for it and you are effectively locking yourself into a tightly proprietary technology.

Of course, there is a silver lining. There are plenty of decent VoIP solutions at all sorts of prices now. For the consumer they aren’t as compelling, but for the corporate, they’ll fit into the IT and telephony landscape much more nicely.