What if you were told that you could talk (or chat) with over 400 million people for free? That is what companies that use phone systems based on the open source product, Asterisk, can now do (see “Skype for Asterisk Now Available“).

With no additional hardware, businesses can download the Skype for Asterisk module and enable their employees to direct dial Skype users right from their existing telephone! Combine this module with Skype’s existing ability to provide live text chat, video chat, and screen sharing with over 400 million Skype users around the world, you can now easily equip your organization with a robust communication platform for very little cost.

I’m not advocating that companies go out and buy an Asterisk phone system, but I am suggesting that you should be asking yourself if your infrastructure is flexible enough to effectively communicate with all of your constituents. As we know, our prospects, customers, partners and vendors want to communicate with us when and how they want. The more flexible we can be to communicate with those who have a need for our services, the more compelling our services will be to them. It is my conviction that unless you have this mindset, you will wake up one morning and realize the train has left the station and your company is not on it.

In March of this year I travelled to London to attend the 2009 UC Expo. Industry experts had indicated that Europe was about 12 months ahead of the US in the adoption and deployment of Unified Communications (UC) systems and I needed to get a sense of what was available and what was coming down the pipe. My primary focus was to understand the capabilities of Microsoft’s OCS (Office Communication Server) system because some of our customers and prospects were asking questions about OCS and how it might integrate with their existing Avaya, Nortel, and Siemens PBX systems. I’m pleased to say that one of our Microsoft partners became OCS certified ) shortly after I returned to the States, and I now have the Office Communicator client open on my desktop – right next to my Skype client.

I will spend some time in a future post talking about how impressed I am with Microsoft’s Office Communicator (MOC), especially with how it seamlessly integrates presence into my exiting Office applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, Live Meeting, etc). However MOC does not afford me the same type of convenient, cost effective access to our prospects, customers, partners and vendors that Skype currently does. For example, we just hired two sales people on the east coast and it was effortless to begin communicating with them via Skype – voice, chat, and now screen sharing – for no cost. Similarly, one of the modules we use on our Service Portal was developed by a company in Spain and I chat with their developers via Skype.

What is your experience with communicating with your customers, partners, vendors and prospects? Do you find chat clients like Skype valuable? Does your company allow 3^rd party chat clients on your network? What lessons have you learned? I’m all ears.

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