Vancouver-based Telus Corp. has joined Rogers among the pantheon of Canadian telecommunication giants offering Skype for Business, the company announced this week.
Available immediately, Skype for Business, powered by Telus, allows Canadian businesses to take advantage of the popular online video communications platform’s enterprise version, which launched last year as a replacement for Microsoft Lync and, unlike garden-variety Skype, can handle online video meetings of more than 25 people.
In a statement released on Feb. 16, David Kozicz, Telus Business Solutions’ vice president of product development and marketing, said the company was committed not only to effectively delivering Skype for Business to its customers, but to supporting its adoption with a range of services to help companies create a more collaborative workplace.
While Skype for Business is designed for companies of all sizes, Telus will be focusing its efforts on organizations with more than 250 employees, providing both a fully-managed private cloud service powered by the company’s Canadian data centres, and a variety of advisory, training and adoption services through its Transformation Office division. The company is also collaborating with technology services firm Avanade to enhance its Skype-based customer service.
With mobile workers expected to represent around 75 per cent of the Canadian workforce by 2018, the need for companies to add services like Skype for Business to their toolboxes – and consequently, the customer base for Skype for Business providers like Telus and Rogers (but not Bell) is only going to increase.
Microsoft charges $2.50 per user per month for Skype for Business in Canada.