Re: Cisco is the problem, Skype is good enough
Since before the MS takeover, Skype have done a Skype-for-business offer (roughly £10/month per host license I beleive, I'm sure bulk discounts can be arranged) whereby you can stop the creation of supernodes and control other aspects of it's delivery and operation in an Enterprise environment.
Personally I'm more a fan of webex with it's delicious bandwidth scaling and uber functionality than I am of Skype's rather feeble efforts, but the consumerisation of IT means that users only know about Skype so that's what they want. As soon as you say 'ok, if you pay for the staff costs in administration, control and monitoring, and are willing to pay for a massively increased corporate internet connection to cope with the chunky bandwidth usage... they soon shut up. Well. That particular customer does. Then you have to have the same conversation with other customers every other week.
If your customers are pestering for free Skype and you don't already have something to offer them that IS suitable, I'd advise you to prep a stock email about the real options available to them. and then suggest they try webex who now offer a free up-to-three-in-a-conference version of Webex Meetings with more or less the same functionality as the full £30/month version which may well do the trick for quite a lot of business areas considering using VC tech for mobile collaborative teamworking rather than full 'conferencing'. Plus it's proxy aware, comparitively bandwidth light and really very secure. The client can be activeX or Java-called so doesn't cause much in the way of deployment issues, plus it has a simple toolbar integration with Office and outlook and some other stuff if you choose to allow users to install it.
If only the 'full' version wasn't so expensive, it'd be perfect (£30 per host per month + call charges? Come ON Cisco, you're pricing yourselves out of the market, no wonder enterprise customers - including us, now who've been investigating and trialling a wider webex deployment - are using or considering using lync!)