Events

We’re holding small focus group discussions with potential partners and businesses. If you’re intrigued as to how Skype could benefit your business, or interested in helping us refine our offerings for business customers, please get in touch through our marketing research partner Hawkeye.

Groups are this Thursday evening in London. There is limited seating, so please email Janese Evans with your contact information and, a few sentences about the size and focus of your business.

We’ll get back to you as soon as we can with a few questions and the details. If you qualify for a open position and participate in the discussions, you’ll be paid an honorarium to compensate you for your time.

Our user experience research team needs the help of UK businesses to shape the future of our business products and features.

In their continual drive to improve our products they’d like to visit your premises for half a day and conduct interviews with a selection of Skype users and decision makers, and observe how Skype is used in your business. Data collected will be strictly confidential and not shared or used for any purposes other than improving Skype for Business.

Your feedback has the potential to influence design changes, new features and product offerings. We’ll also offer compensation of €200 of Skype Credit (or equivalent in Pounds Sterling) for your time.

If you’re interested in participating please complete this form.

I spoke earlier at Interop Las Vegas about the future of modern business communications. Read on for an summary of my presentation.

IT is consumerizing – over the last 5 years, we’ve seen

• consumer-grade technologies becoming robust enough
• enterprises shift their stance on acquisition, management and deployment of consumer technologies
• IT responsibilities divided into a centrally controlled (enterprise-owned) model and a market-driven, user-selected model

driven primarily by these factors:

• Economy: 43% percent of knowledge workers in US enterprises with 500 or more employees already use non-company-owned equipment on enterprise networks and systems.
• Connectivity: We live in a world with an increasingly ubiquitous, pervasive and affordable communications infrastructure, which encourages new acquisition and delivery models, especially those using the web.
• New technology: A combination of affordable devices, low-cost communications, widespread ownership means that access to and acceptance of new technologies is growing.
• Employees: Employees bring their experiences and expectations from the ‘real world’ into the work environment – this is particularly relevant when considering an increasing population of digital natives in the workforce.

Skype is a great example – we started out as a consumer product, but now 35% of our users say they use Skype for business purposes. *

The key, however, is that saving money is just the start – you can use Skype to save time, and most importantly, stay ahead.

The Skype for SIP and Skype for Asterisk betas let you make really low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles around the world from your PBX system, and video calling, IM and presence make for richer conversations, enhancing collaboration and improving efficiency. Plus, Skype’s increasing availability on mobile phones and other mobile devices means you can use it while on the go.

And the proof, as they say, is in the pudding:

• 20% of our users make Skype video calls for business purposes †
• 95% say they are saving money *
• 62% say they communicate better with customers using Skype *
• 70% say they are using it while traveling on business *
• 80% say they are seeing increased productivity *

Thousands of companies are already using Skype for Business – how about you?

* Source: Skype user study of 4,000 users in the US, UK and China conducted in March 2008
† Source: Results from a December 2008 online survey of 2452 active Skype users in the US and UK

Watch Stefan Öberg live from Las Vegas at 09:30 Pacific time – and don’t forget to track #interop on Twitter for up-to-the-minute commentary.