UPDATED 13:35 EDT / DECEMBER 22 2010

Skype Eyes the Enterprise Market, Faces Downtime Today

Skype’s new CEO, Tony Bates has some great plans for the company, and is seeking the enterprise market. This internet telecommunications company financially separated from eBay last year, who bought it in hopes of making its services beneficial for its auctions. Earlier this month, it has completely separated from it in “brick and mortar” terms. Now, Tony is looking for some bigger enterprises and corporations to use Skype.

It’s an important outlook, as Skype is going after an IPO. It will need to achieve bigger contracts and make its services as accessible and reliable as possible. This IPO is coming as soon next year, and is expected to raise somewhere around $100 million. It will trade on NASDAQ where Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and Citigroup will be its book running managers.

While rolling out an IPO is a good news, we also heard some bad news as Skype lost 10 million connections today. This drop was a result of several complaints from the users saying they are not able to log into the service to saying that the program is crashing across all platforms, whether on their mobile device or PC. Skype engineers are working on the issue and hope to resolve it as soon as possible.

Skype must also face its competitors like Google, which is looking to gain relevance with Google Voice, running a special promo this season. In hopes of grabbing share from Skype in the VoIP space, it will continue to offer free telephone calls in Gmail throughout the 2011 year. It said that the calls would remain free in U.S. and Canada “in the spirit of holiday giving and to help people keep in touch in the new year.”


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