Earlier this week, Ecosmob launched new Web pages to highlight VoIP services across various platforms, including WebRTC. The company offers VoIP-based solutions to meet organizations’ communication needs, helping to enhance organizational productivity and provide easy, scalable means of communication. I caught up with the Ecosmob team to discuss this growth of VoIP services and why the company decided to add WebRTC as part of this portfolio.
First, let’s take a look at some of the benefits VoIP offers to organizations. Ecosmob described a few, including its flexibility, cost-effectiveness, features, quality audio and video, ease to maintain and mobility. Using IP-based communications means you can expand your solutions with features and capabilities, such as messaging, file transfer and HD audio.
Ecosmob offers a range of VoIP-based solutions, such as IP-PBX, conferencing, call broadcasting, click-to-call, phone verification, session border controllers, fax servers and IVR-based applications. It looked to WebRTC as the next evolution of these types of solutions.
Ruchir Brahmbhatt, director at Ecosmob Technologies, explained, “Since inception, we've been working on open source platforms. We believe in open standards. When we came across WebRTC, we thought, ‘This is going to be very successful being open, flexible and robust.’ As you see, people are building all kinds of different solutions using WebRTC. We think there are endless possibilities with WebRTC. Using HTML5, responsive design and WebRTC we can build very nice intuitive solutions. So we started exploring WebRTC. We built some prototypes, did some tests in different devices and then we included WebRTC as our solution offering.”
While WebRTC has often been touted as disruptive, innovative and a game-changer, it still has its set of challenges as it continues to develop. Browser support, video codec standardization and the shift in user behavior are all considerations as WebRTC grows. Another big one is awareness.
“So far we haven't got lot of direct inquiries for WebRTC from customers. That doesn't mean it is totally unknown,” Brahmbhatt said. “We had some opportunities specifically about WebRTC solutions. We are exploring integration opportunities with them. We think still it requires creating lots of awareness. So we're doing our part and spreading awareness about WebRTC among our customers and offering them solutions based on WebRTC when possible.”
Part of raising that awareness is helping people understand the benefits of WebRTC.
“WebRTC is an open standard so it is very flexible,” Brahmbhatt explained. “You can choose one of various different signaling methods. WebRTC allows building communication applications very easily. It makes it easier for Web developers to integrate communication in their Web applications whereas communication companies can leverage this new platform to offer feature rich applications based on WebRTC.”
Ecosmob provides conferencing solutions to Audioweb, including a WebRTC-based phone with audio and text support to reduce telecom costs. Ecosmob is also integrating screen sharing, file sharing, presentation and other features to the solution, and is working with a few other companies to improve conferencing solutions. It’s also working on expanding the type of companies and use cases integrating WebRTC, including education.
Distance learning is among the top areas expected to see benefits from WebRTC-type solutions.
“It is hard to say if it will impact one domain more than others. It has very huge potential. It makes online education much easier to implement and use. This allows special faculties to deliver lectures remotely to needy students. On the other hand, it can allow integrating call center flow to company websites so users can contact call centers directly from browsers and agents can connect from anywhere to answer the calls. Business conferencing can benefit from flexibility of WebRTC, which makes building features like video conferencing, screen sharing, chat, presentation, etc. easier and cost effective,” Brahmbhatt said.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
