Internet Telephony services giant Skype, according to a report by the Company has tapped Tony Bates as its new CEO. Tony Bates was formerly a top level executive at, networking solution providers and developers, Cisco. Over there, Bates was the incharge of company’s service providers and enterprise groups.
In its announcement, Skype said that Tony is the holder of nine patents and is very much an expert on the internet related technologies. Apart from working in Cisco, Bates has also been a part of boards of several voice and video technology companies including the likes of YouTube, LoveFilm, BubbleMotion and ToxBox.
The Internet Telephony service Skype in the month of August filed for a $100 million initial public offering. In that particular filing, Skype said that it had generated almost $406 million in sales so far in the year 2010. All these earnings are from a customer’s base that includes a total of 560 million registered users. 560 million registered users mark a total of 41% increase as compared to the previous year results.
A report published by the Company cited that only 8 million users of the Skype services are those which pay for each month otherwise almost 112 million are free users. Earlier in September, rumors were flying that Network Giant, Cisco, is planning to buy Skype. The internet Blog TechCrunch reported that Cisco had indeed submitted a bid to buy Skype as per the information provided by a reliable source.
Well, it seems that Cisco is not the only tech company that is taking keen interest in the acquisition of Skype. Search engine giant, Google also has been trying to get hold of the company. Skype has excelled in recent times to get a prominent foothold in the telephony market. Most notably, Skype settled a deal with the Wireless carrier Verizon. This deal will allow the Verizon Customers to use Skype instead of making more expensive calls through the company’s own package.
Skype history has been a real rocky and shaky one; initially EBay bought the company for a price tag of $2.6 billion in 2005. Then later on EBay was unsuccessful to employ the company services as per its requirements so EBay again sold the company for $2.75 billion to an investment group. Since then, Skype has been on a roller coaster ride increasing its user base and revenues.