Last week we failed to point out what our partners over at RiderResearch had been both predicting and suggesting, which was the eBay would settle with and the founders of Skype to closed down a huge vipers next of litigation around the sale of the company to a group of investors.
The deal takes pressure off the management of eBay and means they no longer have to explain in detail why their predecessors, specifically former CEO Meg Whitman, purchased Skype for $2.6 billion without getting their hands on the intellectual property behind the company.
The story broke in the Wall Street Journal last week with Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis joining the buying consortium and receiving a 14% stake, and joining the company’s board.
The two founders were thought to have made a cash investment in Skype, and then withdrew their lawsuits and contributed use of the Joltid software, the key to Skype’s operation, to the new company.
More importantly, the deal clears what had become a major roadblock for the VoIP sector and a cloud looming over the advent of IP-enabled communications for business customers. Freed of the clutches of eBay, which never developed a business strategy that integrated Skype’s service, the VoIP provider now has the backing and the customer base (close to 500 million-strong) to answer a fundamental question: Can one of the original over-the-top VoIP providers, with a popular and powerful service but little revenue-per-customer, transition to a high-value, high-margin provider of advanced IP communications services to both consumers and businesses?
A Skype spinoff would be ‘good for the industry,’ said Irv Shapiro, CEO of cloud-based IP telephony provider Ifbyphone, when the sale was first announced. ‘It really validates the value of applications moving into the telephony cloud.’
The answer to that question, though, is by no means obvious. While Skype has a terrific brand and has built out a business unit that provides intriguing services to business customers, the vast majority of its revenues still come from consumers who pay little-to-nothing for the service.