Transcript for WebRTC Conf & Expo - Acme Packet
Blair Pleasant: Hi. This is Blair Pleasant. I am in San Francisco at the WebRTC Expo and with me is Chad Hart. Chad is Director of Product Marketing for Acme Packet. Tell me about Acme Packet’s role in WebRTC and what kinds of solutions you are offering.
Chad Hart: At Acme Packet, our products fundamentally are about delivering trusted first class real time communication sessions. WebRTC is about delivering those sessions basically to web browsers. Historically what we do is really bridge communications islands. Historically, it has been between service providers or service providers and enterprises. Within enterprises, there is this huge population of two billion internet users out there most of whom have access to web browsers to communicate. We are trying to bridge basically the communications islands to those two billion internet users. The product we have to do that basically does, can talk, SIP and some of the traditional telecom and telephony protocols, and also talk to WebRTC using web-based standards and using WebRTC and even using some of the precursors to WebRTC that exist out there, too.
Blair Pleasant: What are some of the biggest challenges that you are trying to overcome?
Chad Hart: In terms of the product, the standards are very immature. I think that is probably one of the bigger challenges. Apple hasn’t thrown in their support. Microsoft has a different variation. WebRTC itself doesn’t include any standards or any signaling for doing things like call set-up and addressing; doing simple things like, “hey I am trying to call you; I want to hear a ring-back tone or a busy signal if you are not available.” None of that exists in WebRTC. Those things do exist inside the SIP protocol and other protocols. So some of the challenges that we are challenged with is how do we extend some of those and what are some of the models where it does or does not make sense to use protocols like SIP within the browser. We have different methods we can do that. We have web standards, more web-like oriented ways of doing that to hook into our infrastructures, to simulate some of that call control and addressing. We are also working on ways to extend SIP into the browser with technologies like SIP over WebSockets.
Blair Pleasant: So tell me about the Happy button.
Chad Hart: So the Happy button is an idea, actually I will give credit to Andy Ory, our CEO, coined this term probably over a year ago, but the idea is, say I am here at the conference. Actually, I just bought a house, I have a lot of financial transactions going on; I need to make sure I have enough money in my account. I log into my bank app and I say, “oh wow, I have a problem.” It’s not obvious for me to figure out and I really just want to talk to an agent to absolve this problem right away. Today, if you want to do that, I need to pop out of my app. I am probably going to have to go and look up the bank’s phone number. I have to navigate through all these different menus. I have to cut and paste that phone number or remember it and then go to my dial pad, dial it in, pick up. Now I have to go through an IVR, which is going to take several minutes. In order for me to actually talk to a person, it’s going to take several minutes. Then I have got to explain to them what my issue is and what I see and spend all that other time, so it really takes a long time. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was just a Happy button on there? When I have a problem I want to talk to a real person and just resolve this quick: boom, hit the button. You are talking to an agent and they can see everything on my screen; my problem. They fix my issue and it goes away.
That’s really what we are talking about. We see this as one of the really exciting applications of WebRTC for enterprises, contact centers or even service providers to enable this sort of thing.
Blair Pleasant: Now contact center vendors already provide similar types of capabilities, so what does WebRTC bring to the table that isn’t there right now?
Chad Hart: What I am kind of describing here is a click-to-call type functionality. That does exist with technologies like Flash. The problem with that is Adobe is moving away from those, toward more HTML5 standards, and they do require plug-ins, and they do not always work consistently or well on mobile. So it introduces a lot of problems.
The idea of WebRTC really just kind of makes all that easier by embedding it inside the browser and making it standard and really kind of a universal functionality is the goal. So because it lowers the bar and makes the experience much more seamless, and addresses a larger market, we do expect that there will be a lot more portion use of WebRTC and technologies like that where there hasn’t necessarily been in the past.
Blair Pleasant: Okay, great. Thank you very much.