Why is Skype so successful as a corporate communication tool?

From my personal experience Skype is getting more and more presence as a non-official corporate tool providing advance communication capabilities.  According to the official reports 35 percent of Skype users utilize it for business purposes [1].
In my opinion the three more important features making Skype so attractive in those environments over other VoIP/Messaging tools are the following ones:
  • Unblockable communications: Some corporate networks try to restrict employees traffic making impossible to use other VoIP tools.  Skype is able to overcome that limitation encapsulating all the traffic under HTTP/HTTPS connections while maintaing a good enough voice quality.
  • Conferencing support: Skype was a pioneer offering voice conferencing support without additional equipment in the network.  That innovative solution allows free and easy to use conferencing support, being a feature commonly used in corporate environments to maintain the audio meetings with your colleagues.
  • Easy to use: Most of corporate employees are not interested in learning how to use and configure a complex software.  Skype makes a very good job offering a software working out of the box as expected with an appealing and intuitive user interface.
Are we watching the end of corporate PBX in favor of a great, proprietary and out-of-control software? Or will we be able to learn the lesson and make a competitive offer equally great but federated and standards based?

[1] http://gigaom.com/2010/04/20/skype-q4-2009-number/

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