Quobis Discusses Impact of WebRTC

In anticipation of WebRTC Expo, WebRTC World sat down with Iago Soto, chief marketing officer of Quobis, to discuss the impact of WebRTC and how Quobis is leveraging the technology to enhance its solutions. Quobis is a privately-held Spanish company founded in 2006, providing emerging unified communication products and consulting services to telecommunication operators and other large companies. Please scroll down to read the entire question and answer session below.

1) What have you enabled thanks to WebRTC?

Our approach to WebRTC technology started with IdentityCall, a desktop-based (Java) solution that we released a year ago, which makes it possible to be sure of the caller’s identity using a two-factor authentication scheme. We have feedback from existing customers willing to avoid the installation of a thick application onto their computers, so we started looking at WebRTC as a solution to migrate our IdentityCall softphone. After that, we realized that there was a real opportunity for WebRTC endpoints, where we focus our activity nowadays.

2) What signalling strategy are you using?

We started initially with SIP, so we developed and released QoffeeSIP, a completely open source JavaScript SIP stack that allows the development of WebRTC endpoints with SIPoWS signaling. When we released Sippo, our corporate WebRTC endpoint, we received some requests from gateway vendors in order to adapt it to other signaling protocols (API REST, JSON, etc). So, we re-engineered SIPPO to be “agnostic” on the signaling plane, decoupling the signaling layer from the user interface layer. Thanks to this modular architecture, we now have the ability to develop WebRTC endpoints with almost any signaling method in a very short time.

3) Are you supporting other codec strategies as well?

No, we just rely on the browser media management. We’re focusing our development efforts on enhancing the user experience and enterprise-class capabilities of SIPPO, but definitely not on the codec issues.

4) What do you want people to know about your solution?

Sippo is the first fully-featured WebRTC-enabled enterprise communicator with advanced capabilities that has passed interoperability tests with different WebRTC vendors, including WebRTC-to-SIP ones.

5) What do you think will be the biggest impact of WebRTC?

From our perspective, we think that the biggest impact is going to be within the enterprise. WebRTC has some well-known features, like easy-adoption, zero-installation and multi-device support that will raise some new opportunities for residential users and consumers, but we like to focus on the possibility to interconnect to legacy SIP or analog systems and that updating the endpoint is not needed. These are the key-points for solving problems, like those related to BYOD or teleworking, and to improve communication with customers.

6) How will your customers, specifically, benefit from WebRTC?

We had the opportunity to launch a whitepaper called “WebRTC for Telcos: Is There a Real Business Opportunity?” where we try to sum up all the use cases for them. We think that telcos can address the demands of end users (especially corporate users) in terms of mobility and multi-device availability with a business model with recurrent revenues and be competitive by comparison with over-the-top companies.

7) Are you connecting with any other solutions?

Our strategy is centered on the development of rich endpoints, so we had to talk with all the different infrastructure vendors who are planning to release WebRTC-ready solutions. We have been working on interoperability tests with some of them, and, as a result, these vendors are recommending our endpoints for the projects they are working on. We cannot disclose names, but if you look carefully you can see SIPPO running on several booths on the show.

8) What are you looking forward to accomplishing at WebRTC Expo?

The expectation that we have detected at WebRTC Expo is amazing. We were one of the first companies to sign our sponsorship but, later, a lot of companies joined the show. We are really interested in getting in contact with network equipment vendors, as we want to become their technological partner for WebRTC clients. Also, it will be interesting to get more information from the status of rest of the industry, where we want to play a relevant role.

9) What is the one thing you want readers to know about WebRTC?

There is a lot of information available about the benefits and use cases of WebRTC in different scenarios, but we want to highlight the security problems that are going to arise. Some weeks ago, we hosted a webinar called “WebRTC Security Concerns” where we mentioned some of the traditional VoIP attacks that are going to be present in WebRTC, as well as ad-hoc WebRTC attacks, like denial of service, web server hijacking, web socket attacks, etc. This presentation is available at our website and we strongly recommend downloading it.