The market is facing a sharp technology transition from traditional Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) based telephony systems to IP Telephony that is taking place at full steam all over the places. This brings to the companies many advantages among which convergence, simplicity, cost reduction and computer telephony integration that ultimately leads to undoubted increase in productivity, better, quicker, easier communication and information sharing. Companies have the unique opportunity to turn all the above into a significant competitive advantage in a market, which is every day more global.

One evidence of this shift towards IP is the fact that the Voice is carried very often over IP even when a traditional call is made. Carriers are offering more and more a data connection only to their customers and the enterprises use it for both data and voice access.

On the other side new cool services and solutions based on VoIP are gaining unbelievable consensus among the consumers as well as the Commercial market. For example Skype has rapidly established a strong leadership world wide in the consumer VoIP market and it currently features millions of users including employees of companies who benefits from it. This is raising a new need for their companies that need to integrate and merge the new Skype reality with the existing telecommunication infrastructure to take full benefit of it.

The final objective is to make sure that employees take full advantage of all Skype services without having to handle a double handset infrastructure or double telephone numbers and, most of all, avoid security issues.

Skype and enterprise convergence

STONEVOICE has developed SKYSTONE, a software based SKYPE gateway that interconnects any ip telephony solution or traditional PBX to the “skype world”. This represents the best answer to the needs raised in the above session and immediately allows all the employees to take full advantage of skype services without having to handle a double handset infrastructure or double telephone numbers. The first immediate advantage is that mobile or remote employees can use a skype client to call the phones in the office and vice versa without any complexity as described in the two pictures below.

Let’s take a more detailed look in the next sessions to the true advantages introduced by SKYSTONE such as calling Skype accounts from IP phones, web click2call, SkypeOut and SkypeIn services.

Calling Skype accounts from IP Phones

SKYSTONE allows each employee in the office to place calls to skype accounts belonging to remote or mobile employees directly from desk phones in the office.

Thanks to SKYSTONE,the remote skype clients will be seen as extension of the central office telephony solution therefore every employee just have to dial that extension to reach the remote skype user. It’ll be the SKYSTONE gateway which will route the call across the internet and the skype network to reach the remote account of course without seizing any of the traditional ISDN telephony trunks of the office. This will be perceived as a natural and very easy of use integration of an innovative, cheap service like skype into the existing company telephony infrastructure.

Of course also skype remote accounts can dial the central office and the call will be terminated on the phones of the office telephony system.

By interconnecting the telephony solution with the skype world SKYSTONE allows to use all the telephony services in the office such as voice mail, conferencing and IVR even through skype accounts further extending the benefits of the converged solution.

Web Click2Call

Recently, more and more enterprise web sites allow end user or potential customers to click-to-call for free leveraging internet to receive information or to access customer care. The huge number of skype users around the world makes it the most natural client to access these services offered by companies. SKYSTONE can come along with a package to integrate with the company web that allows offering this click to dial service. The true value of SKYSTONE is that once again the calls received from skype customers browsing the company web can be terminated on desk phones of the company telephony solution, therefore leveraging the same call agents, operators, IVR, ACD and queuing services available for standard telephony calls.

This simplifies the integration of the click to call services, maximize the existing customer care infrastructure and investments without compromising the quality of the support offered to end users.

SkypeOut for Enterprise

SkypeOut is a Skype service that allows calling any phone number, anywhere in the world using the skype client running on your computer.

Skype is known to have the best rates for PSTN calls to every country therefore leveraging SKYSTONE,SkypeOut could be seen as a “virtual and cheap long distance carrier” for voice calls. Configuring Least Cost Routing on the IP PBX, the enterprise can automatically route the most expensive PSTN calls (e.g. international calls) to skypeOut saving money as detailed in the picture below.

Everything will be completely transparent thanks to SKYSTONE: