IT EXPO — Much of the early comment on the purchase of Skype by a private-equity investor group focused on the ramifications for eBay (EBAY), the online auction site that purchased the VoIP provider in 2005. But the more interesting question may be, what does this deal mean for not only Skype, but for the VoIP industry as a whole?
Reaction from IP telecom industry figures in Los Angeles for IT EXPO was almost uniformly positive. The relatively hefty price paid by the investor group led by prestigious Silicon Valley firm Silver Lake Partners represents a watershed for IP telephony providers, many IT EXPO attendees agreed.
“It’s good for the industry,” said Irv Shapiro, CEO of cloud-based IP telephony provider Ifbyphone. “It really validates the value of applications into the telephony cloud.”
As of the end of the second quarter, Skype had 481 million subscribers, a remarkable figure for a company six years ago. With revenue per subscriber hovering at less than $1, however, it has become clear that Skype cannot thrive without a set of premium services, for which it can charge more, and without a strategy to attract businesses.
Skype and Digium Tuesday released the full version of Skype for Asterisk, which enables users to make and receive Skype calls from their Asterisk phone system. It was released in a free beta version earlier in the summer. Henceforth, it will be sold on a per-license basis.
What was not entirely clear in the announcement of the Skype sale was how this will affect the ongoing legal struggle over the core technology for Skype, which is owned by a company called Joltid, controlled by Skype co-founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Joltid filed suit against eBay, alleging the online auctions company had violated the terms of its license agreement to use the Skype software. While it seems unlikely that Silver Lake and its partners – which include Andreessen Horowitz, the new investment fund headed by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen – would have agreed to the acquisition without some resolution to the intellectual property dispute, no such agreement has been detailed publicly.
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