Today I spoke at WebRTC Conference Japan. My message was about how next generation services will really be what drives the future of WebRTC. Take for example, Romo. Romo is an affordable, personal robot that uses your iDevice as his brain with WebRTC. In the future, you will see more services like these driving the business of WebRTC.
But first, let’s establish where WebRTC is at today. Tsahi Levent-Levi, who writes the bloggeek.me blog regarding WebRTC, published a very nice infographic at the end of December 2015 about the state of WebRTC. There are some interesting tidbits in here such as that there are over 850 WebRTC vendors and projects at the end of 2015, with more than 26 vendors per month adopting WebRTC in 2015. Clearly, there is momentum building, even if it is in the background.
When a WebRTC service is implemented, there are a few issues to be resolved, namely interoperability, scalability, integration into existing architectures, and centralized recording. Centralized recording may seem like a strange item, but these days messaging typically needs to be recorded, and organizations need to be able consolidate and centralize the recorded data. You can’t do that on a handset. So centralized recording is key. A media server plays a key role here, as well as in scalability and interoperability. In fact, media servers play a key role in pretty much all of the messaging related services.
I also spoke about some key WebRTC use cases I’ve seen. I bucketized them into Vertical (such as emergency services or healthcare), Customer Management, and Collaboration. Some of these are adjuncts to existing architectures and some of these are all WebRTC (if they are more contained). These are all exciting developments because if WebRTC is to succeed, they need to be practical for business, either with regard to making money, or saving money, or providing more services.
WebRTC is gaining traction, slowly but surely. I thank the organizers for inviting me to speak at the conference. There will also be a Dialogic sponsored WebRTC meet up being held at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. If you’re going to Mobile World Congress, be sure to sign up.
