WebRTC: The Survey Says...WebRTC: The Survey Says...

Interoperability was seen as the biggest challenge, while UC--not surprisingly--was seen as facing the biggest impact.

WebRTC (Web Real Time Communication) is the next wave affecting the enterprise, and Dialogic recently surveyed 169 executives of service providers and application developers to collect their opinions about WebRTC and the effect it will have on their business models. About 87% said that WebRTC would have a significant impact on their product roadmaps. The roadmaps will then influence the enterprise's implementation of WebRTC applications.

Question 1 of the Dialogic survey asked about the disruptive nature of WebRTC. The respondents identified that the browser-based capability was its most disruptive aspect, with 59.5% selecting this choice. It is predicted that more than 1 billion browsers will be supporting WebRTC by the end of 2013. The remaining 40.4% of the opinions were divided among the web services model, open source technology, royalty free video and audio codecs, and finally the backing of Google and Mozilla

Question 2 asked the respondents what they thought would be the market impact on telecom solutions. The survey respondents selected Unified Communications (37.7%) as the single market segment that would experience the greatest impact from WebRTC deployment. Many people looking at WebRTC are predicting that the convergence of audio and video, conferencing, and collaboration capabilities will be very attractive to the enterprise when offered as single package. An interesting question not asked is "Will UC companies like Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft compete or complement WebRTC with their products?" It is quite possible that Lync plus Skype will be developed as a competitor. Avaya and Cisco will probably embrace WebRTC but add a number of proprietary extensions.

The second choice in terms of most impacted area is video conferencing systems at 29.3%. With all the different and usually incompatible video conferencing products on the market, standardized WebRTC could vastly change this market. The video conferencing vendors will be pushed into either producing WebRTC-compatible products and/or modifying their products to support WebRTC while simultaneously supporting their existing video capabilities. This will set up a competition; which is better and which is cheaper as well as whose products deliver the greatest interoperability.

The final three choices for technologies affected: contact center vendors, who are pursuing WebRTC as an improved way to engage customers; and the IP PBX vendors and audio conference services, which were ranked fourth and fifth in the opinion of the respondents.

Question 3, "Telecom Services: Market Impact" explores which operators and providers would be disrupted by the introduction of WebRTC. Mobile network operators (24.6%), with their huge number of subscribers, would feel the greatest impact, respondents said. The next three operators/providers--multi service operators (cable companies), PSTN service operators, and over-the-top service providers--were about the same at 21%+. The cable companies will probably upgrade their set top boxes to support WebRTC connections.

ISPs were considered the least impacted by WebRTC, mainly because there are so many voice and video services already running over the Internet. WebRTC will be a competitor to the existing services usually provided by third parties, not the ISP itself. At minimum, some of the operators and providers will offer gateway services to connect legacy PSTN and VoIP services to WebRTC users.

Next Page: The Roadmaps

Another question asks, where is WebRTC on the roadmaps for products and services of the vendors, operators, and providers? The answers are qualitative, asking about the significance of WebRTC. "Very significant" was the selected opinion for 42.9% of the respondents. Overall, about 87% of the respondents felt that WebRTC would be moderately to very significant in influencing their roadmaps. This is to be expected because most of the anticipated applications for WebRTC are yet to be delivered, but the hype abounds. As the WebRTC market matures, we may see a number of marginally successful or failed products and services. The growth of WebRTC will probably be in the consumer arena, which is hard to predict.

I think the most important finding in the survey covered the WebRTC adoption challenges. The biggest challenge was interoperability, with 33.9% selecting this choice. There is nothing to guarantee that all the browsers will implement exactly the same WebRTC code.

WebRTC can support what appears to be an infinite range of applications. Think of call center software that can be a application running on a PC, laptop, phone, or tablet. Will all these apps from different call center software vendors be interoperable? Application interoperability may be beyond the people generating WebRTC standards. We may see common voice, video, e-mail and content delivery, but I am sure there will be many specialized apps that will not have the backing of any standards group. Therefore app interoperability may be impossible to deliver except for very common applications.

The next challenge cited (30.4%) is mixing multiple video and audio and data streams. Instead of everyone doing this the same way, we may see cloud services arise that will translate these streams like some of the existing video conferencing cloud services in the market today (e.g., BlueJeans and Vidtel). If cloud services solve the interoperability problems, then do we need standards or just a few major vendors that, although they are not compatible, control the market and provide a small number of choices for a cloud provider to support?

Scalability will be very important for consumer-related use of WebRTC, which may connect millions at a time. Enterprises will be more interested in high availability for the connections and applications they use. 16.7% of the respondents selected these two as important. The enterprise will also be concerned about security, especially for industries that have regulatory or compliance requirements to be satisfied. What is interesting is that security gathered only 13.1% of the choices. Lastly, virtualization was selected at 6%. This may be a non-issue soon, as virtualization has matured to a degree that if it is possible now, it will certainly be in the near future.

The more you know about WebRTC, the better you will be prepared when you need to make a decision. Keep up with the series of blogs written by Dave Stein and Chris Vitek that started this week with "A WebRTC Primer." You will probably experiment with WebRTC before making a major commitment. We still don't know what Apple and Microsoft will do in response to WebRTC. They may embrace and add proprietary extensions or produce competitive alternatives. Be ready for WebRTC--but don't buy into all the hype.