WebRTC: Buyers Beware

If there's anything that should make you sleepless at night when deciding on your WebRTC communications architecture it is the vendors you selected to rely on.

If you look at the acquisitions in the WebRTC ecosystem, you will notice some interesting ones:

• TokBox acquisition by Telefonica, making TokBox  stronger
  
  
• Crocodile RCS acquisition by Acision, ending as Acision's API platform for developers called Forge
  
  
• AddLive acquisition by SnapChat, practically taking them off market
  
  
• Solaiemes acquisition by Comverse this month, similar in some ways to TokBox and Telefonica
  
  
• GoInstant acquired by Salesforce.com, adds WebRTC, and then closes shop to focus on internal Salesforce needs

Three out of five left customers "happy;" AddLive probably caused vibrations at the management of the customers who decided to use it, and GoInstant made it to the last page of our newspaper.

This creates a buyers beware market, where those in search of an API vendor to use need to think twice (or more) before deciding who to work with.

This becomes even harder if you check the general stability of most WebRTC API Platform vendors – most of them are still startups, with fewer than 50 employees; sometimes a lot less. Each with its own first, second or third round of fund raising activities – some might not make it to 2015 and run dry.

The other side of the story has SnapChat and its ilk – companies that are looking to add real time communications to whatever large service they already have, and then to control and own the technology – they are fine buying it outright and taking it off market. To some extent, this has also been the end result of Crocodile RCS – Acision started as a customer and ended up as a full owner.

WebRTC isn't the only such technology. The space of BaaS and Big Data are also in consolidation:

• Barb Darrow on GigaOm has an interesting analysis of Facebook and Delta Airlines' decision to in-source instead of rely on third parties
  
  
• Andrew Brust takes a look at analytics and sees consolidation in the horizon
  
  
• Cloudera, a Big Data player raising $900 million – this can be seen as a move to indicate no acquisition or takeover in its future, attracting larger potential customers
  
  
• Kin Lane analyzes the shutdown of StackMob after being acquired by PayPal, and what that says about the future of BaaS

This transient market state is going to stay with us for a while.

What should a customer do?

1. Select a suitable platform and hope for the best
2. Select the elephant in the room (TokBox or Twilio most probably), even if they aren't the best fit for the situation
3. Invest heavily on its own infrastructure
4. Buy one of the smaller players and take them off-market

No easy options here.

1 Responses to "WebRTC: Buyers Beware" - Add Yours

Michael Monroe 8/14/2014 1:02:20 PM

Good post Tsahi - you're right there are no easy answers here. This represents the tip of the "iceberg". Cisco recent acquisition of Assemblage is another example. BUT as you know - this is exactly what happens in a nascent market with emergent technology companies. It's a process that occurs outside of ICT as well. In the case of WebRTC - as the market grows and expands they'll be more acquisitions/consolidations ... a pruning of sorts that validates the market/technology, enables growth and will ultimately help ensure the survival/viability of WebRTC. Yes, it means innovating/early adopting customer's beware BUT this is where those of us in the advisory roles can help them make good choices to fit their business need.