We are almost to June, and WebRTC is about to take off. Last year at the San Francisco WebRTC Conference and Expo, the predictions were that June would be the take-off month for WebRTC. With the availability of browsers at the beginning of the month and the Atlanta WebRTC Conference and Expo at the end, it sure looks like June is the time.
At last week's Google developer Conference, Justin Uberti, one of the Google WebRTC development leaders, said that he believes there will be 1 billion WebRTC-enabled devices (think peers) by the end of 2013. While he is biased, there is significant reason to believe that he is probably right.
Mozilla also announced the general Beta of Firefox 22 has WebRTC enabled in the Beta version, the final stage before general release in a few weeks. At that time, both Firefox and Chrome will have WebRTC in their general shipping browsers. Firefox and Chrome account for 57 percent of the browsers.
The smartphone volume numbers for Q1 show that 75 percent shipped with Android, totaling over 162 million units. If all of those move to Chrome with WebRTC and assuming no further growth, that will be 640 Million WebRTC peers by the end of the year. With iOS dropping to 17 percent share and only 6.6 percent year-on-year growth compared to Android at 79.5 percent growth, can Apple ignore WebRTC to retain the closed garden of FaceTime?
So, this means that 75 percent of the people buying smartphones are getting WebRTC and 57 percent of PC browsers will have WebRTC by the end of the year. This is potentially over a billion users having a WebRTC enabled "peer" by the beginning of 2014. Can enterprise IT and telecom afford to ignore this? If you are not planning your 2014 WebRTC direction and planning for WebRTC in your communications and Contact Center, you may well find your competitors are your customers’ new best "peer"!!!
Edited by
Rich Steeves
