Which end of the stick are you on?

I had the chance to speak with Bill Lewis, CEO and Dr. Alex Gouaillard, CTO at Singapore’s Temasys.  Tsahi Levent-Levi also did a recent interview and excellent posting on his bloggeek.me blog, but I wanted to tap further into Alex’s prospective on the challenges and opportunities for WebRTC.

Temasys, as a company, started doing specialized development of communication applications within a target industry. In the midst, they developed expertise on WebRTC.  They’ve developed a series of base building blocks of WebRTC infrastructure and API interfaces that enable them to quickly custom develop WebRTC applications. If need be, Temasys will also operate portions of this solution for the customer (mostly large enterprise & service providers).

Temasys represents an emerging hybrid of this collision between the web and communications. They have infrastructure components, but don’t sell a ready-mix product. They have an API, but you can’t sign up to use it. They understand client/application development, but they don’t sell just clients. They’re not a service provider, but will run the service for you if desired.  Clearly a new type of company.

Alex sees the base ingredients (and types of companies) of WebRTC as (1) infrastructure, (2) API’s and (3) client/application. Companies may operate in one or more of these buckets, Temasys being in all 3. I like that simplicity and thought some more on it.

Traditionally in telecom, infrastructure has been the big $$$ spend. But this iceberg is inverting with infrastructure perhaps just one “git clone” command away as various companies and individuals contribute key WebRTC libraries back to the open source community. Individually, there not enough, but collectively it adds up. Note: Github now has 680 repositories related to WebRTC (there were 493 in June).

For the API provider (who generally has, but hides their infrastructure) they offer a rapid way to develop an application for the upstart. The developer can focus solely on the application with no worry to the infrastructure. This is a great in the early days, but if the application is successful the developer may need more control levers which the API provider may not have. As well, at scale, there may be a need to control costs. Hence the API provider must always be expanding their control elements while looking to keep their costs as low as possible.

As companies look to concatenate communications into a new or existing applications, companies like Temasys offer a 1-stop shopping to quickly bring the project to life.