Are WebRTC & Other Software Tools Your Destiny?Are WebRTC & Other Software Tools Your Destiny?

Debate the merits of WebRTC all you want, but understand that enterprise communications is evolving and this technology and other software tools are playing a role.

We've got a friendly but spirited debate happening on No Jitter about WebRTC, in this case springing from recent posts by technology advocates Andrew Prokop and Tsahi Levent-Levi. While recognizing WebRTC's potential, Andrew has taken note of some of the technology challenges with WebRTC, while Tsahi has been more upbeat -- and folks have been chiming in on the comment board with their thoughts on the matter.

As with a lot of new technologies, you can pretty much pick either of these two gentlemen's perspectives on WebRTC, depending on what you choose to emphasize. But I think the bigger picture here is that WebRTC is a part of a larger evolution in communications -- the move from hardware to software and from the public switched telephone network to the Web.

WebRTC isn't delivering on its hype, but that's because the hype was, well, hype. It was pretty easy to get people excited about the idea that suddenly every Web browser on the planet was essentially going to be a Skype-style communications client. It didn't help when the worst of the hypsters promoted the idea of there being billions of WebRTC-capable browsers that would somehow quickly emerge and change everything overnight. We all know how big the Web is, so obviously anything that uses a Web browser is going to be just that big, right?

WebRTC is not proving to be the fast-buck opportunity that a lot of people hoped it would be, but it is getting baked into the larger communications pie. Andrew's column shows how Avaya is leveraging WebRTC, and the session border controller vendors, most notably Oracle, also are moving quickly to incorporate WebRTC interfaces into their products.

As time goes on, enterprises are going to be looking at communications differently. When they see an opportunity for an integration or new feature that might improve their employees' or customers' ability to collaborate, they're going to be able to address that opportunity in various ways. One way might be with a WebRTC-enabled application or feature. In another case, it might mean using an API to hook into whatever existing software they're hoping to communications-enable. In any case, what enterprises are going to want is for the developers that serve them to have the right tools in their toolkits, and it won't matter whether these developers are on internal teams or at independent software vendors.

It's this toolkit idea that Tsahi is referring to when he writes, "Never have we had so much power in our hands as developers."

That's why software is going to get a stronger focus than ever before when we convene Enterprise Connect Orlando 2015 next March. We're launching a brand-new track on Communications Software Architectures, and also, for the third year running, we'll be having our one-day conference-within-a-conference on WebRTC.

We're not going to try to convince you that these software trends are going to change your communications overnight, but we are going to make available to you as much information as we can to help you prepare for the gradual transition to a world where WebRTC, APIs, and other software trends play a much larger role in your communications environment. Hope to see you there.

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