Temasys progresses with Citrix

Temasys has been a strong advocate of WebRTC for several years and Alex Gouaillard, their CTO, has been vocal both inside the WebRTC community and a regular contributor to help move the technology forward. Chip Wilcox, who joined as their CEO just over a year ago has been an energy ball of activity. Temasys has attempted to jump start things with various open source initiatives including their skylink.io, which provides a ready-to-go signaling library for WebRTC. Temasys has been a good WebRTC citizen.

Temasys announced today that Citrix has licensed their WebRTC plug-in for usage with the Citrix GoToMeeting Free web collaboration tool.  The Temasys browser plug-in enables a variety of non-WebRTC browsers (read Internet Explorer and Safari) to support WebRTC. That Citrix felt they needed a plug-in is perhaps a testament to the current and near term environment for the desktop. It’s a good advertisement that Temasys has a solid understanding of these fundamentals.

For an enterprise to make a move is always longer than you’d like. The realities as Chip Wilcox points out is that despite all the fast moving technology, corporations have loads of legacy web applications, many are still Java based. As a result IT departments force the usage of older browser technology to reduce support costs or simply that those applications are not compatible with the updated browsers so you can’t upgrade.

Whatever – no matter how fast things are moving, the old stuff will always have a tail. Internet Explorer will be with us for a while.

Similarly, no one has expectations that Apple’s Safari will support WebRTC anytime soon and that leaves another gap of audience coverage.  While Chrome is available for Apple devices, asking someone to download a new browser seems like an instant “no thanks” response.

Hence, while Citrix using a Temasys plug-in is obviously not what you want in perfect world, it recognizes we don’t live in a perfect world.

While visible in the WebRTC community, Temasys hasn’t been as public about exactly what they are trying to do (as a business model). I’d like to know more. However talk is cheap (as this blog proves) and you can’t sell products you don’t have, thus I suspect Temasys is quietly working away on an expanded offering.