Tony Bates of Cisco As Skype’s New Chief

Cisco might have lost a very important person in their team as top executive Tony Bates now becomes the new Chief of Skype, a popular Internet video and phone service company. Cisco has been their rival, in fact they were expected to introduce a new line of lower cost video conferencing systems this week which is also a thing that Skype has been offering.

According to a blog post, Bates has been replaced by chief technical officer Padmasree Warrior in Cisco while Bates replaces Joshua Silverman of Skype. “Tony has been a great leader and asset to Cisco over his nearly 15 years here,” wrote Cisco’s spokesman John Earnhardt.

Bates’ experience in this particular field is undeniably stunning. In fact, he has served on a number of technology-company boards including YouTube before its acquisition by Google. With his leadership, it has been expected that he could figure out how to squeeze more profits out of the company’s 560 million registered users.

Skype has been an earning company lately wherein they were able to earn $13 million on revenue of $406 million through the first six months of this year. However, the company still needs more than this, and this has become Bates’ greatest challenge.

Aside from having a new chief, Skype have already installed a new chief financial officer, general counsel and marketing head. The company has been acquired by eBay way 2005 and it was just November of last year that Silver Lake Partners, a technology-focused private-equity firm, led a group that acquired a majority stake in Skype, valuing the company at $2.75 billion.