WebRTC Applications

So what can you do with WebRTC? The reality is the people actually doing something meaningful aren’t at trade events milling around or speaking, they’re not asking vendors what they should do. They are simply doing it. During the VoIP heyday, you never saw Vonage at any event, never saw them speaking and rarely heard them talking to industry press rags. Yet they were the poster child for VoIP.

The primary benefactors of WebRTC are those that already have a large web following and simply looking to enable better communications. It’s easy to imagine Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Ebay, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Live adding a WebRTC enabled application to their offering. Similarly, people like Webex, Go2Meeting and join.me will add WebRTC to overcome issues with Flash and generic network issues. I expect all of these guys to ultimately announce some WebRTC capabilities as part of their broader offering.

There are likely to be emerging stealth companies who’ve fashioned new era communication services with an attempt to take on Skype or simply change the world. With the underlying costs to operate a WebRTC service so low, these stealth companies won’t need much cash to survive and can annoy those trying to make money for years. However, they will have to have a compelling offering and like any service, have to attract a following without spending a lot of money to get users.

PBX and PBX “like” services will certainly supplement their softphone clients with webphone HMTL clients. That makes sense and likely enterprises will have

Perhaps simpler, various folks have tried to offered “click to dial” from a web page type service. Most required the user to download something and that ensured near certain death, or they used Adobe Flash which mostly didn’t work. If all of that managed to work, the user would have likely then encounter some sort of network issue.  All in all, novel but not fit for the mainstream. WebRTC hopefully will fix all of that.

At the basic level, it’s not hard to imagine me visiting an airline website and clicking to reach a customer service rep. Older folks won’t likely embrace this but the younger folks will and the airline can likely cut their 800 phone costs. Layer on some add’l data that could be sent automatically and the airline rep would already know who you are, what reservation you’re calling about and what web page you’re on. The beauty of this is the underlying complex will have all been minimized.

The competition for our communications mind share is clearly going to increase.