Skype Hiring and Hinting at Imminent Lync Integration

Skype has revealed plans to up its workforce in London and elsewhere, whilst indicating that tight integration with its owner Microsoft’s Lync platform is coming soon.

The videoconferencing firm will boost its team to 330 people in the English capital, up from 250. Many of the new roles will be in the development and engineering divisions, said Rick Osterloh, Skype’s vice-president of product and design, during a briefing yesterday evening.

Lync up

It was known Microsoft was planning to tie Skype closer into the Lync fold following the acquisition, but the latest comments hint the move is not far away.

“Microsoft Lync communications software and Skype are complementary – Skype brings its consumer presence, strength in small businesses with a strong external ecosystem of customers, suppliers and partners,” said Osterloh. “Microsoft Lync has been designed from the ground up for the enterprise, with its full range of enterprise-class features.While we don’t have any specifics to share at this time, our expectations are that Microsoft will connect Skype users with Microsoft Lync communications software.”

He added that Skype has a big opportunity when it comes to the business market, an area where the company has been fairly quiet, particularly above the SMB level. When Skype is part of Lync, it will take the service into closer competition with Cisco, yet Osterloh said the company did not see Cisco as a competitor.

Cisco issued a complaint to the European Commission in February, raising concerns over the competition implications of Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype. Cisco said the “European Commission should have placed conditions that would ensure greater standards-based interoperability, to avoid any one company from being able to seek to control the future of video communications.”

Skype has been working on integrating with its parent company’s software. Skype for Microsoft Windows Phone went into beta earlier this year and is expected to be made generally available soon.

Meanwhile, using Skype could offer a handy way of avoiding government surveillance. The Coalition has plans in place to allow GCHQ to ask ISPs and mobile operators to hand over communications data, such as who users have been contacting and when.

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