Should small businesses rely on Skype?

Several readers blasted me for my blog post last week about the Skype outage. I assumed that many of the people using Skype's messaging and voice over IP service didn't rely on the service for their primary form of communication. But several people pointed out that many small businesses use Skype to communicate with clients, employees and partners.

These comments got me thinking about this segment of the market. And now I'm working on a story that will take a look at how small businesses use free communications services like Skype instead of products that they would have to pay for from Microsoft or Cisco Systems.

I'd love to get some perspective from business users who rely on Skype for day-to-day communications. Specifically, I'd like to know why these users have chosen a free service over one they'd have to pay for, and whether or not the recent outage would change their minds about this choice. On the flip side, I'd also like to hear from some small-business owners who decided to go with a unified communications solution from Microsoft, Cisco or any of the other competitors in that market. So if you fit into either one of these categories and you'd like to help me with my story, please send me an e-mail at [e-mail].

[Jim_Mattos]

You get what you pay for!!!

Like all things in life, you get what you pay for. Although there are <br />obviously problems with the Skype system, small businesses will <br />need to rethink thier communications networks in the event that <br />the problem arises again.

[MaLvaDo39]

Or get off Windows

and the restarts and broken way of computing will go away...

[ocasta]

Fallbacks

We've been using Skype for two years as our primary internal <br />communication system and last week was the first outage. Why <br />wouldn't we continue to use it? <br /><br />I'm amazed at the number of people who have leapt on the "get <br />what you pay for" bandwagon. I've worked for large companies <br />that pay telecos vast sums of money that have lost the phone <br />system for a day or who have large IT departments and the <br />email system has died for two days. <br /><br />We'll continue using Skype. Last week was just a wake up call to <br />make sure you have plans for system failure. A good lesson for <br />businesses of all size with whatever systems they rely on.