A call has been made to enterprises to ban Skype - or at least take steps to ensure it is secured. Five reasons for an enterprise to ban Skype in a corporate environment are outlined. However, Butler Group, Europe's leading IT research and advisory organisation states the REAL reason for controlling Skype within the enterprise and which has been missed, is 'Super Nodes'. Butler Group acknowledges that Skype is not the perfect enterprise VoIP solution but is certainly a boon to small groups and the private individual. Following is comment from Richard Edward, Lead Analyst, Butler Group.

Skype was never after the "enterprise market" just as MSN, Yahoo, and Google weren't either. Unfortunately, however, enterprises are made up of private individuals and consumers, and if IT can't provide us with the tools we need, then we go out and get them from elsewhere.

The analyst from Info-Tech Research Group missed the real reason for controlling Skype within the enterprise: Super Nodes. Skype (the company) has very few physical assets, and that's because they leverage the power of the devices connected to the network.

The reason why Skype works as well as it does is because of these computers called Super Nodes - think of them as you would a local exchange, routing your call etc. Any computer running Skype with a clear-line-of-site to the Internet, plenty of bandwidth, and plenty of resources (memory, CPU) can become a Super Node, and this could result in this machine and its network segment becoming overwhelmed by Skype traffic.

Skype is not the perfect enterprise VoIP solution, I don't think anyone said it ever was; but it's certainly a boon to small groups and the private individual. At the start of 2004 there were around 4.3 million businesses in the UK, and only 0.1% of these (around 6,000) had more than 250 employees; 0.6% have 50-249 employees. So, for 99.3% of small firms with less than 50 employees Skype is great.

The analyst who's sourced in the email is Richard Edwards, Lead Analyst, Butler Group.