Techaisle Analyst Insights

At CTIA, Skype announces its VOIP application for RIM's BlackBerry smartphones, while COO Scott Durchslag outlines the future of Skype and its impact on small businesses.

Could this indeed be a killer app? It could be. As a small business my mobile phone is my lifeline. Indeed at Techaisle we all rely on our mobile phone. for inter-office calls and for communicating with our remote teams, we use Skype. So the combination of the two would help tremendously.

It is intriguing to think about what this does to a unified communications strategy of companies like Microsoft and Cisco. There are some differences and a comprehensive UC solution offers much more. But the low end of the market - very small businesses may find the above solution just good enough.

what do you think?

All leading IT companies - Microsoft, HP, Dell, IBM/Sun, Oracle, Salesforce.com and Amazon (yes, I would call then an IT company) are driving towards providing a variety of cloud based platform and application services. Complementing them are a whole host of new companies that are aggressively developing solutions for this space. No doubt over the next 5 years cloud based services will be the new arena of intense competition. A lot has been written about the pros and cons of the various services so I won't address them in this post. Very little though has been talked about the impact on the channel.