Video Indecision in WebRTC: To Wait or Not to Wait - That is the Question

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the WebRTC industry's most important event at the moment - the WebRTC Conference and Expo III in Santa Clara, CA. I have a long form post summarizing my takeways from that event.

During the first day's business track session, Brent Kelly gave his view of things, with practical thoughts for the enterprise. He made some insightful points and suggestions for the enterprise. In terms of specific WebRTC capabilities, Brent cautioned enterprises against adopting WebRTC in the video domain due to the indecision of the video codec, while starting to use its voice and data channel capabilities.

To me, this meant two things:

1. WebRTC is here to stay. It can and should be adopted by enterprises in the parts of it that have been agreed - even if there is no final standard at the moment
2. People take mandatory codecs much more seriously than I do

The big question remaining in the enterprise, then, is the Shakespearian one: To wait or not to wait?

If you ask me, asking such a question is ignoring the realities within the enterprise.

When video gets adopted by an enterprise, it is for internal communications. You go purchase a Polycom system or invest heavily in Cisco Telepresence when you have multiple sites across the globe and you need people to communicate via video. Which is great, until you go check what employees are actually doing - they use Skype.

They use it from home. They use it from their desktop. They use it on the go. They use it to communicate across enterprises, talk with suppliers, consultants, fellow employees or outsourced workforce. They use it whenever they need to communicate, and the enterprise high end video conferencing system is too cumbersome to operate, either because you need to find and schedule a meeting room, remember useless dialing sequences, familiarize yourself with a hard-to-use system or need to coordinate something that takes a second to get done via other means like Skype.

I know. I worked at a company that built video conferencing systems and had been dog fooding on it for years. And everyone there had Skype as well. Not that it got used for every call, but some did trickle out to Skype, so I am sure it happens a lot more often in other enterprises.

An enterprise has multiple systems it uses. Some don't work well together. Sometimes it is the voice calling system and the video conferencing one. At other times it is the website and the internal intranet. Or the employee directory and the Salesforce accounts. These can be bridged, but take time and might or might not be done within an enterprise. There's always some gap to close.

This part of ignoring WebRTC's video channel because of indecision of a video codec, be it VP8 or H.264, means that the thinking in the enterprise ties down everything to its existing video conferencing system - with all of its benefits as well as its disadvantages. If WebRTC can be used to overcome the disadvantages while maintaining both systems side by side, then why not?

The business session we had at the Expo event was followed later that day by demos from participating companies.

Weemo, a vendor providing APIs on top of WebRTC, showed integration it did with Salesforce.com, enabling seamless communication via Salesforce Chatter between employees - right from within the browser. If this doesn't scare the incumbent enterprise video conferencing players, then I don't know what else can. As for enterprises who use Chatter, how long before they realize they can use that channel to enhance internal communication further without connecting it to their H.264 enabled video communication system?

When you ask yourself if you should or shouldn't use WebRTC for video in your enterprise, first check if it can help you close gaps with the current solution you have. If it does, then why care what video codec it uses any more than you care about the color of the walls in your office's restroom?