LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype and the subsequent announcement of its future integration with Lync in Office 365 strengthens Microsoft’s portfolio for SMB customers looking for a secure form of communication, with customers and business partners bundled with an attractive collaboration suite.
The integration of Skype with Lync will enable SMBs to gain global control of internal communication and collaboration, yet be able to connect to consumers, businesses and trading partners around the world. This will provide SMBs with the ability to call landlines and cell phones along with Lync’s pre-existing capabilities. Microsoft’s recent announcement of its desire to strengthen collaboration with local service providers to guarantee performance and security for their cloud-based services should provide a strong quality differentiator to SMB customers, and thus increase Microsoft’s share of the lucrative European SMB sector.
“AMI’s latest SMB Market Study reveals high levels of interest in Unified Communication solutions when bundled with a Productivity / Collaboration Suite for a low fixed monthly cost,” says Lorenza Brescia, EMEA Cloud Services Director at AMI Partners. “Increased purchase probability produced by these kinds of service bundles offers service providers a potential market opportunity of $3.8BN amongst the 11 million SMBs in Europe’s largest markets.”
Brescia continued: “The combined offer of Office 365 with Skype’s potential can boost Microsoft’s presence in both domains, and Skype can act as a catalyst to cross-sell complementary hosted solutions. However, SMB customers will need guarantees of service quality if Microsoft wants to capitalize on Skype’s extensive user base.”
Unified Collaboration software remains a key battleground between the big technology companies for both market penetration and mind share, and quality of service support will prove to be a differentiator to gain new customers and maintain the existing ones. How Microsoft will converge Skype with Lync and the related quality of service that the company will effectively offer may prove crucial to its success in building penetration in SMB markets.
”The integration of Lync with Skype will facilitate and accelerate adoption in business environments of video and social media already commonly used by private consumers,” concluded Brescia, “confirming the trends recently launched by Google (with video-enabled Google Talk) and Apple (with FaceTime video-calling software).”
About the Study
AMI's 2011 SMB Cloud Playbook - Strategic and Tactical GTM Planning Guides provide a tactical framework for architecting cloud-based services offerings to meet the growing demand for cloud services "bundles" and a perspective on cloud-related dynamics shaping up in the SMB space, including:
• Cloud-related needs among four types of SMB segments; behavioral and usage characteristics; future adoption plans
• Cloud and ICT spending, market opportunity, price sensitivity
• Service bundling preferences and demand uplift; vendor value propositions and offers/bundles
• Purchase channel mix and capabilities
Studies are available for each of the following countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK.
For more information about these studies, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, please call 212-944-5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com or visit www.ami-partners.com.
About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.
AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years’ experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.
AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 30 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs, Cloud services studies and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.