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March 12, 2013

Actually Using WebRTC has Great Potential


The concept of Web-based real time communications (WebRTC) is great by itself, but there are still those who look at the technology and wonder about the actual applications of such a program. Some, however, are looking at the technology and figuring out how it would apply to their own lines of business and operations. Recently, one analyst, Camille Mendler, took a closer look at how WebRTC might prove useful.

Mendler, who recently designed Informa's Telecom Cloud Monitor with Caspio, also uses several other communications tools to keep in touch with various contacts throughout the day. Evernote organizes projects and information management. Salesforce.com keeps track of interactions. Skype and Lync also play a role in things and even the humble mainstay of many an office, Microsoft Office 365, also has a part to play. Social media services like Twitter and LinkedIn also step in, and that means a lot of different programs all vying for that chunk of attention. That may be the truest measure of where WebRTC comes into play.

WebRTC has great potential as a means to consolidate all these interactions and all these programs—or at least the functions they serve—into one central umbrella program. For instance, the idea of Twelephone, dubbed a “next-generation social telephone,” has garnered some attention in this field. A few basic operations, points and clicks, and there's an encrypted P2P voice call ready to go out over Twitter. With such operations in question, users can focus on Twitter operating in their browsers, and use some of the other software, like Salesforce.com, to log interactions as staged from within the browser. It also improves on some other levels; Mendler cites no longer needing to remember a voicemail password on a Cisco IP phone.

Perhaps its most important measure, as Mendler reckons it, is as a way to improve the interaction and collaboration among users in a thoroughly digital economy. E-mail only really goes so far in terms of collaboration capability. More commonly, it's used as a way to point back to evidence of compliance—Mendler calls it, colorfully, a “cover-my-butt tool”--but passing around messages can really only go so far. WebRTC offers up a much faster, much higher-impact, tool for collaboration by allowing users to easily make contact and keep it up as long as needed, like a phone call with an option for face-to-face video and the ability to send files easily back and forth.

With a variety of companies looking to get in on the action, like Plivo and TokBox, and a variety of companies already neck deep in the action, like Google and Mozilla, it's clear that many more applications will emerge for this new technology in fairly rapid fashion. With an increased amount of supply in the field, the overall value and usefulness of WebRTC will likely climb to match. WebRTC still has a lot of room to grow, but the current crop of material suggests a much greater use down the line.




Edited by Brooke Neuman
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