Acision, a provider of mobile communications network infrastructure, is partnering with Crocodile RCS to enable WebRTC-based services and add value to operator and enterprise customers with Acision WebRTC. I caught up with John Parr, co-founder and managing director at Crocodile, Peter Dunkley, technical director at Crocodile, and Maria Hudson, VP Marketing at Acision to discuss the partnership and WebRTC’s role in the companies’ strategies moving forward.
The key takeaways from the announcement are mobile and the enterprise – this relationship will focus on both. Crocodile started out developing its SDK for PCs, but the growing trend for usage is mobile. If you want to add voice and video to mobile apps today, it’s very difficult, thanks to challenges like video codecs and transmission over a network. Dunkley emphasizes that using WebRTC may not make it 100 percent easy, but it will definitely be easier, particularly for enterprise developers.
“It’s going to be used in ways we can’t even imagine,” Dunkley said. He explained hypothetical scenarios like car insurance apps, and sending a video in real-time to a claim right from an accident scene. He says developing these kinds of applications today would be something along the lines of “incomprehensible” due to challenges like the above, but in the future, it will be much more realistic.
Crocodile was only founded in 2010, and now is one of the major players in WebRTC, indicative of how quickly this market is growing. Parr explained that this partnership is taking Crocodile to the next level in the enterprise space. Crocodile is powering this new solution, Acision WebRTC, which delivers carrier-grade peer-to-peer communications and can integrate into existing infrastructure through standard protocols and applications, such as SIP. The solution features all sorts of communications bells and whistles – voice, video, presence, fallback to SMS, file transfer, screen sharing and more.
Crocodile has created a cloud network with an SDK and an API, which was designed to bring the benefits of WebRTC to application developers and is scalable from a single individual to large-scale companies building WebRTC into their websites.
“Acision has a very innovative strategy moving forward,” Dunkley said. “Our technology will help Acision drive into this area. A lot of products in this area will be built on that underlying technology, so the Crocodile expertise will be used to make these products more compelling to the enterprise market as well as allowing them to offer something completely new to carrier customers.”
Parr explains that voice and video are just part of communications. Other types of services, such as presence and messaging, integrate to make a solution complete. Think about communication clients today, like Skype. Users typically look to see if another user is online (presence), and then make sure they’re available to chat (messaging) before even getting to the video calling and media component.
“It’s not so much that WebRTC helps with messaging, it’s more that a solution isn’t complete if it’s just messaging,” Dunkley said. “WebRTC on its own is a fantastic thing, but the value is limited; it gets richer as you use it with these other features.”
This move adds on to Acision’s focus on providing IP messaging, consumer and enterprises services, which include SMS, spam and fraud control, Rich Communication Suite (RCS) and personalized messaging.
“We’re not moving away from our messaging heritage, but we are taking our expertise, adding the Crocodile expertise and broadening what we do and taking it to enterprises and developers,” Hudson explained.
In a statement, Dunkley said, “Today, any mobile device running Android OS, and any PC globally with Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox has WebRTC built-in, so for a developer writing an app using this API there is a potential audience of over one billion end points. With this in mind, WebRTC technology is poised to revolutionize the way people communicate using both fixed and mobile devices. It allows web applications to control real-time voice and video communications directly from the browser, making it unnecessary to download soft clients, apps, or plugins. Remote communication with any business is also enhanced through process and context exchange making communication a truly shared experience. Together Acision and Crocodile can unleash the full potential of WebRTC.”
He also spoke about communication in the future – for the vast majority of communication channels, there’s not going to be any specific value attached to it, it’s just going to be there and it’s going to be easy. The trick for WebRTC and WebRTC companies is to do something that brings actual value to the customers in a way that is either saving them money or making them money, and that gets done when you combine different technologies together.
JF Sullivan, EVP Product Management and CMO at Acision, said, “WebRTC makes all interactions contextual and, as an enabling technology, will provide massive savings for any business that requires real-time communications. Call centers looking to run their entire operation via a web browser connected to Google Chrome can do so cost effectively with direct connectivity to customers and over-the-air updates. Online banking applications may also be built into financial sites to enable customers to speak to a representative directly and as soon as they’re signed into their online account, without the need to provide additional passwords or authentication. WebRTC also enables peer-to-peer data to be shared securely, without a third party being able to listen into it, and could therefore have an extremely valuable impact on the world of business communications. These are just some of the exciting benefits that this can provide.”
Dunkley explains this value for WebRTC customers will be in obvious channels like call centers, healthcare and banking – and that these areas are obvious because they’re industries where there is money to be spent and they can directly monetize from solutions like WebRTC.
Sullivan said, “Enterprise and operators who own large amounts of legacy infrastructure or call center technology, may now leverage this technology head start by integrating WebRTC into their communication strategy. Operators, for example, can extend their core network to web browser applications quickly and simply. Anyone in the business of real-time communications should see this as fundamental to their business – bringing new options for IP-based engagement.”
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
