WebRTC's 60/40 SplitWebRTC's 60/40 Split

The results of a recent annual survey of end users gibed with what we see at Enterprise Connect Orlando: the WebRTC rooms are packed, while the level of actual adoption remains fairly low.

Our friend Graham Francis at The SIP School has released his annual survey of end users about issues relating to SIP, SIP Trunking and--as this has become an addition focus for The SIP School--WebRTC. Graham does our SIP Tutorial at Enterprise Connect Orlando every year; he's recently added a WebRTC component to the tutorial, and in this year's survey, his WebRTC questions garnered some interesting responses.

First he asked, "What do you know about WebRTC?" Here were the responses:

* I have never heard of it = 33.61%
* I know what it does on a "conceptual" basis = 58.33%
* I understand all of the technical elements relating to WebRTC = 9.29%
* I am a WebRTC developer = 0.82%

That seems to gibe with most of what we hear anecdotally at EC Orlando, where the WebRTC rooms are always packed, but the level of actual adoption is usually fairly low. I had the opportunity to talk with a CIO-level executive about WebRTC recently, and, to paraphrase, he basically told me that he was interested in finding out how big an issue WebRTC was; once he'd satisfied himself that it wasn't going to be imminently appearing in his enterprise, he was happy to disengage from the topic for the time being and move onto other tech issues that are more immediate for him. Certainly for higher-level executives that's the case with WebRTC, and I suspect it's still the case for a lot of IT/communications decision-makers as well, as Graham's survey suggests.

And the next question on the survey was even more interesting. The survey asked, "Do you think WebRTC will be 'allowed' to flourish as a Peer to Peer technology, or do you think it will follow the same path as SIP and require multiple intermediary devices such as Session Border Controllers to work?" Almost 60% said SBCs would be "a must," while just over 40% said peer to peer would win.

In his analysis following this data point, Graham points out, "SIP was initially developed as a Peer to Peer protocol, yet time has shown that varying implementations of SIP services has required the use of SBCs in order to normalize traffic, provide support for NAT traversal, transcoding etc. etc." So it'd be reasonable to expect WebRTC to go the same route.

Except that, as Graham notes in quoting a Google exec, WebRTC "wasn't created with Telecom in mind. Neither was it created with UC in mind. It was, and still is, about the Web". Indeed, the difference is clear in the beginnings of each technology's name: SIP may be about more than just voice as a medium, but it clearly comes out of a world that envisions communications as a series of discrete Sessions. The Web can accommodate a session view of communications, but it by no means is limited to this model.

Ultimately, the 60/40 split on this question makes perfect sense; actually, the fact that 40% of respondents expect to see a peer-to-peer model seems to me like a big win for WebRTC; most enterprise technology leaders' default setting tends to be one of enterprise control, which is what the SBC represents. Getting 40% of the people to be open to the new model seems like a great jumping-off point.

In the end, a 60/40 split, or some other breakdown that leaves substantial numbers on both sides of the divide, is probably what we'll end up with on this question. That's the model we're moving to across the board when it comes to communications and enterprise control--build systems that allow for that control, but accept the fact that there will also be activity going on around, over, and above that point of control.

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