WebRTC Expo Excitement

This week the WebRTC Expo event took place in San Francisco, California. The event was organized by UCStrategies Expert Phil Edholm with TMC. Blair Pleasant was also in attendance from UCStrategies.

More details to follow, but the conference was a huge success. There's measureable excitement about WebRTC and lots of very interesting ideas and solutions are coming forward. The event started off with a keynote from Google, which is appropriate as Google has been one of the biggest contributors to the project.

Cisco's Cullen Jennings was also in attendance, Cullen chairs one of the primary groups finalizing the standard. Also, several UC platform vendors were at the event including staff from Avaya, Siemens Enterprise Communications, and Mitel. There were no announcements from these platform vendors, however it was nice to see them so clearly engaged.

Our friends at Hookflash released its beta. Vidtel released its WebRTC gateway. Acme Packet demonstrated its new WebRTC multi-vendor IMS interworking capability. Voxeo Labs and Solaiemes announced a solution for WebRTC video calls to existing mobile numbers. Twelephone released a new client side endpoint for Twitter.

Quite possibly the sleeper of the event was Plantronics. Headset (and handset) makers may be in the perfect place when the world becomes an endpoint. Joe Burton, CTO of Plantronics, demonstrated how to get communications between headset and browser (hint: much easier than BlueTooth). Joe demonstrated the capabilities of Plantronics' sensor-enabled headsets that know not only if the headset is on a head, but if the head is near a PC. Just by saying a name and password, the headset can log the user into a WebRTC session in the browser and pull up a contact list. The Plantronics software Spokes integrates the headset with the browser to handle call flow. Information such as audio sample rate can be controlled from the web-based application.

WebRTC is an emerging standard and will show up for free in the browser. The channel opportunity is not around selling WebRTC, but in both enabling customers to understand it as well as providing solutions that leverage it. Most of the UC vendors will be releasing WebRTC-enabled solutions as well as countless new types of communication applications and solutions will begin to emerge.