Skype plays a very important role along with Microsoft's Lync platform and other unified communications and collaboration market players. The Skype platform was first released in 2003 and was originally created by a very interesting group of developers (Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström) and a company known as KaZaA.

Microsoft's purchase of Skype in 2011 for around 8.5 billion USD was an important event for the real-time communication community. Microsoft is currently engaged in using Skype's backbone infrastructure and feature set for their customers.

Skype's rich feature set of instant messaging, video, and audio communication, as well as desktop sharing and VoIP, is used by more than 663 million registered end users around the globe. Skype allows users to have a voice chat via a simple microphone on the computer, video communication via a webcam, and text-based message chat via IM with any Skype user.

Skype is also integrated with the traditional telephony network (PSTN...