A Wakeup Call to UC Vendors: WebRTC Isn't About Gatewaying
A Wakeup Call to UC Vendors: WebRTC Isn't About Gatewaying by UCStrategies Guest Contributor
Knock knock. Is anyone home?
Well… while you were gone, working on better media quality, adding ports to your MCU or just trying to integrate your UC offering with some other UC offering you prefer to call "legacy," the world has changed.
There's this thing called WebRTC, which is going to turn your world upside down. The simple thing you are probably already doing with it? Adding it as yet another interface to your Gateway/MCU/PBX (pick one). But guess what? It is the wrong move. Or more accurately – it isn't going to be enough.
You see, WebRTC is not about a replacement of SIP. SIP was all about a replacement of H.323 – they were something you could compare apples to apples. But WebRTC probably gives you a headache, trying to explain to your managers that it isn't really SIP, and it won't replace it: "it is RTP, but also codecs embedded in it. And the APIs aren't really for merging it to SIP, they are fuzed into the browser."
I can understand how managers find it hard to grok. So you'd better improve your explanations, because WebRTC is going to disrupt your market – not today – probably not in 2013, but come 2014 – someone will make an interesting move. And it won't be a gateway.
Time to wake up.
If you think about how UC vendors work, it is by thinking of themselves as the center of the enterprise. They connect the dots. They offer the communication services. Everything else gets connected to them. They handle the devices – be it room systems, softphones or other devices; they control the video bridges and the gateways. Need to make a video call? Use their products. End to end. If you happen to have another vendor, they will interoperate, but only up to a point.
Need to invite some external partners to a call? Send a link. They will join from a client that will get installed on their PC. No, they can't use the room system in their facility. To get that connected, our IT will need to talk to their IT. A week in advance. And be on call for our call. Better yet – just use Skype and be done with all these hassles. The joys of the enterprise.
What if there was another way? What if the clients – the end devices – the UI – would be an infrastructure – not a system connected through its umbilical to the UC vendor's mothership?
The thing that will happen then is true collaboration. Not the clumsy one you hold within your company only, but one that can connect across enterprise boundaries. It won't come by interoperability, but rather by way of the web.
VoIP had its time. We're toying around for over a decade trying to get two video terminals to just talk to each other. And we failed. We failed because we took the route of interoperability on the highest level. Of getting low level codec exchange up to application level signaling to interoperate. Everywhere and anywhere. I had my share of standardization discussions and interop events. They are fun, but at the end of the day – we are still silos of vendors.
Tsahi Levent-Levi has been dealing with VoIP and Video over the past 15 years, and now focuses on WebRTC at Bloggeek.me.