WebRTC Promises to be 'Dominant Technology' for Real-Time Voice, Video: Radisys

Radisys Corporation, a provider of wireless infrastructure solutions for aerospace, defense and telecom applications, is among the many companies interested in Web real-time communications (RTC).

Being on the cutting edge of technology, it is no accident that Radisys sees WebRTC of interest. WebRTC is an API being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for peer-to-peer file sharing, video chat and voice calling.

Based on the company’s experiences, the majority of telecom and Web development pros have heard about WebRTC, and the implications of WebRTC for stakeholders’ business continues to grow, Ray Adensamer, senior product marketing manager at Radisys, told us in a recent interview.

“Our experience in large NGN and IMS deployments are relevant to help WebRTC services grow from early ideas today to large-scale, revenue-generating services in the future,” he said.

As of now, discussions with customers are more focused on “technical details and how WebRTC can help with specific service ideas and use cases,” he explained. Specifically, Radisys is supplying virtualized, scalable VP8 to H.264 transcoding solutions for WebRTC gateway products. It interconnects WebRTC and IMS services and endpoints. Also, the gateways are now in pilot deployments at many larger service providers, Adensamer said.

“WebRTC media processing is a natural extension of our existing business and competencies, and we look forward to delivering scalable media processing capabilities to WebRTC application and developers,” Adensamer adds. He gives the example of how Radisys supplies Media Resource Function (MRF) products, which provide voice and video media processing in IP networks.

Looking ahead, WebRTC could be a very important offering for the technology sector. From his vantage point, Adensamer said it “promises to be a dominant technology for real-time voice and video. The jury is still out for applications such as messaging and content sharing…. No technology completely dominates at any given time and surely none is universally suitable for all forms of communication.”

It is still early as far as adoption of the technology goes, too. “There are a lot of statistics on the number of browsers deployed supporting WebRTC, but these stats should not be confused with the number of WebRTC service endpoints,” Adensamer said. “Very few WebRTC services are deployed in high volume today, and the list of WebRTC services making money is even smaller. When you compare these numbers to VoIP NGN and IMS services, where Radisys is generating revenue supplying tens of thousands of media processing ports per year, you begin to get a perspective that WebRTC is still in an early adopters phase.” 

Also, Google Chrome already supports WebRTC. So Google has a “headstart compared to other vendors implementing WebRTC,” Adensamer said. He adds that if Google were to support WebRTC APIs “natively in the Android platform, it would lead to an even greater boost to WebRTC implementations.” In addition, if Apple and Microsoft took part in the WebRTC standard-setting process, it would speed up the pace of adoption and remove “fear, uncertainty and doubt of market and technology fragmentation. … Even if Microsoft and Apple were not to come on board, there will still be a big enough market driven by Google and partners, and the open-source WebRTC code available to application developers,” Adensamer said.

Also, he says that contact centers are a “natural early adopter” of WebRTC.  “Most contact center interactions already begin in a browser session, so transitioning a session from IM and chat to an audio or video call based on WebRTC is the logical next step,” Adensamer explained.

Meanwhile, Adensamer is looking forward to the WebRTC Conference & Expo being held next week in Santa Clara, Calif. Events such as the WebRTC Conference & Expo “provide a valuable forum for service providers, vendors and developers to share progress and ideas on growing the WebRTC market and ecosystem,” he said. Radisys is a platinum sponsor of the WebRTC Conference & Expo.  Grant Henderson, the company’s vice president of Corporate Business Development and IT, will be a keynote speaker at a luncheon on Nov. 20. Radisys will also be one of many companies exhibiting its products and services at the event.

“The event is a great opportunity to discuss our existing WebRTC media processing capabilities and product roadmaps with potential partners and customers,” Adensamer said. “Our objective is to build relationships to grow our WebRTC opportunities and business, while bringing back ideas and priorities for our product evolution.”