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November 21, 2013

GENBAND Walks Through Past, Present and Future of WebRTC


In a session looking toward the future, the natural place to start is the past. Brad Bush, CMO of GENBAND, took an audience at the WebRTC Conference & Expo back to the days of brick-sized mobile phones, ginormous desktop computers and dial-up Internet connections in 1995. He says where we are right now with WebRTC is where we were in technology back then.

Some of the major trends that are driving change today are digital billboards, wearable technology and machine to machine (M2M), and the Internet of Everything. He also mentioned virtual reality, which he says is finally an example of hardware catching up with software. All signs point to WebRTC, the communication backbone of these trends.

Like any disruptive technology, the first question is how to optimize this for business. He explained a three-pronged view of the future of WebRTC:

  • Hyper-personalization – Everyone’s data is already close to everywhere. Customers, consumers and B2B know much more about you than ever before.
  • Place – Not just physical, but virtual place.
  • The Moment – It needs to deliver in an instantaneous way, right when people need it.

He calls the moment the “Human Contextual Moment,” which he says is the key to the future of WebRTC.

“Humans have a hard time with exponential change,” he said. Bringing it back to 1995, the perception of the Web used to be a collection of links. People didn’t think about the possibility of e-commerce solutions, social media or applications, and he says we’re in the same place now with WebRTC. “What we can’t see are those applications – what comes next,” he said.

Bush highlighted a customer story with Toy Genius; GENBAND powers the WebRTC functionality on Toy Genius’ website. We saw the front-end view from a user’s perspective, and what the back-end system looks like for agents. The agent can see what users are seeing on their screen and can push different pages or content to their screens, in addition to being able to communicate via video and other features.

“Anybody can now build communication applications. It’s limitless,” he said.

GENBAND’s SPiDR Gateway enables WebRTC functionality for enterprises and developers. It’s a way to connect the old telecom protocols and architectures to WebRTC. It’s software-based and able to put on standard hardware, but also offers carrier-grade capabilities to build WebRTC on any back-end system.

The gateway enables various services for businesses, including rich communications services, a rich Web experience, vertical market applications, call, video and chat capabilities and integration with social networks. 




Edited by Rory J. Thompson
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