Greg Sterling , program director with Opus Research’s Internet2Go, has an interesting write-up over at Search Engine Land on Google’s acquisition of Global IP Solutions (GIPS). The $68 million cash acquisition of the San Francisco-based VOIP provider reaffirms Google has formidable player in the recombinant communications market. GIPS currently provides some of the core VOIP and videoconferencing functions for the likes of WebEx, Yahoo Messenger and AOL AIM and gives Google a foothold into a larger RC strategy. As Greg Sterling notes:

Google will likely build out its VoIP offering (Google Voice) to become a full-blown competitor to Skype and conventional telcos/carriers. However, it already has the capability given its previous Gizmo5 acquisition. GIPS will add video and more muscle to the mix, giving Google some new enterprise tools for Apps and maybe Wave (or whatever Wave evolves into).

One of the drivers for recombinant communications is that consumers and businesses alike continue to gravitate towards the cheapest and most convenient communications channels. The addition of Google as a voice and videoconferencing service only accelerates this trend and offers new choices for consumers and enterprises.

Dan Miller, senior analyst with Opus Research, notes GIPS’ raison d’etre, from its inception, was to provide focus on a high-quality user experience. The GIPS voice codec was the secret sauce that made sound quality exceptionally good on Skype’s early VoIP offering, primarily for PC-to-PC communications. Looking ahead, with network speeds getting faster and Google’s cloud becoming ever-more capacious, GIPS can help focus on both sound and video quality for real-time communications and streaming across broad range of Google services and an unpredictable set of endpoints or devices. High levels of sound quality and reliability helped Skype maintain popularity among end-users even though it is a highly proprietary system in the increasingly “open” and “standards-based world” of RC (Recombinant Communications).

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Tags: VoIP, Google, Recombinant Communications