Our understanding is that "Skype for Business" is the name of the current client. The client still talks to the Lync server, for all intents and purposes.
I worked with people at Microsoft who then joined Talko - I'm confident this is just an acquihire if Ray isn't coming along. It's funny because those people basically left Microsoft only to come back to Microsoft, so it's a great setup for those employees since they'll get probably a nice bonus out of it; but the product itself went absolutely nowhere, I'm not surprised by this move at all.
I wonder if Ozzie is coming with, or if he's dumping the company. I always hoped Ozzie would win the power struggle and run Microsoft, but Ballmer carried the day.
Maybe Nadella and Ozzie can work together. We might actually see Microsoft start pushing the boundaries of computing again. Nadella seems like a pretty good collaborator from what I've read.
The Talko team made awesome contributions to the Erlang AWS library (https://github.com/talko/erlcloud) — huge props for that.
Also, glad we (https://sameroom.io) didn't integrate with them, we almost did.