Speeds time to market for innovative services

WebRTC lowers enterprise IT deployment and support costs by eliminating the need to deploy UC clients, while allowing telcos and developers to create WebRTC-enabled communication and collaboration applications with limited/basic development resources. WebRTC technology-based applications on the browser side can be built quickly by using APIs and extending them as needed.

Furthermore, as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers such as Twilio bring WebRTC-based services (video chat, etc.) to their platforms, there is an opportunity for telcos to leverage these platforms to build and customize their own compelling new services. These tactics greatly reduce the time to market for developing these new cloud-based services that can be accessed at any time and that are fully elastic to accommodate dynamic capacity requirements.

Enables enterprise shift to team collaboration

Today’s employee “workplace” is everywhere, and nowhere. Workers are perpetually in motion and individuals and teams must communicate and collaborate with one another while geographically dispersed across offices, homes, hotel rooms and any location in between. This redefinition of where we work also redefines how we work – and the technology required to support a workforce in motion.

WebRTC enables team collaboration via virtual and customizable, always-available personal meeting rooms that integrate the best collaboration experience with multi-person chat, talk, presence and HD video – all in one place. WebRTC’s ability to extend UC to individuals outside the organization not only allows business end users to add colleagues to their personal meeting rooms, but to external individuals as well. 

Ensures superior mobile experience

Research firm Gartner recently indicated that weak mobile customer service is harming customer engagement. This is a problem, as Disruptive Analysis’ analyst Dean Bubley recently stated that, “mobile implementations of WebRTC are starting to out-accelerate desktop browser-based ones, outside the enterprise. This favors either sophisticated developers able to build apps around the various WebRTC client frameworks, or those using 3rd-party PaaS solutions.”

Mobile smart phone data usage is very different from traditional browsing with laptops and tablets. There has been consistent data showing app usage dominates the overall mobile data consumption, and for that reason telcos should start by building apps that use WebRTC technology on the back end or even integrating WebRTC into existing apps. By creating a more compelling customer experience on mobile devices, telcos will drive more mobile access network usage. For example, adding voice or video capability into a telco’s app that gives account details like usage would be of tremendous value, as it could, for example, help the subscriber reach a representative for more personalized support. 

Improves productivity and maximizes UC benefits

Integrating WebRTC as part of the UC suite increases the efficiency of the solution and improves productivity. WebRTC goes beyond VoIP and allows instant access to voice and video capabilities directly from the browser, allowing it to power several use cases traditionally limited with pure UC – particularly in vertical markets. Through the use of open standards and browsers, WebRTC eliminates the need for complex systems to extend users across firewalls for video collaboration and sharing. In some cases, WebRTC can actually reduce the overall sales cycle by quickly helping the customers and prospects to get the information they need.

WebRTC deployments come with their share of challenges. WebRTC is currently supported by some browser vendors but not others. Mobile users also have some challenges with WebRTC as the browser usage on mobile devices for real-time communications still introduces issues like notification, etc. Despite these near-term challenges, the industry as a whole is making great strides to solve them, presenting telcos with a very real opportunity to leverage WebRTC to develop and deliver Unified Communications services to enterprise customers and consumers.