WebRTC - Who is your "Peer?"

With Tsahi Levent-Levi joining the UCStrategies Experts, we are truly embracing WebRTC going forward. And why not? It sure appears the WebRTC "peers" are about to explode.

At this week's Google developer conference, Justin Uberti, one of the Google WebRTC development leaders, said that he believes there will be one billion WebRTC-enabled devices (think peers) by the end of 2013. While he is biased, there is significant reason to believe that he is probably right.

Mozilla announced this week the beta of Firefox 22 has WebRTC enabled; the final stage before general release in a few weeks. At that time both Firefox and Chrome will have WebRTC in their generally shipping browser. Firefox and Chrome account for 57 percent of the browsers.

The smartphone volume numbers for Q1 show that 75 percent shipped with Android, totaling over 162 million units. If all of those will move to Chrome with WebRTC and assuming no further growth, that will be 640 million WebRTC peers by the end of the year. With iOS dropping to 17 percent share and only 6.6 percent year-on-year growth compared to Android at 79.5 percent growth, can Apple ignore WebRTC to retain the closed garden of FaceTime?

So, when 75 percent of the people buying Smartphones, 57 percent of the PCs, and over a billion users have a WebRTC enabled "peer," can we in enterprise IT and telecom afford to ignore it? If you are not planning your 2014 WebRTC direction and planning for WebRTC in your communications and contact center, you may well find your competitors are your customers' new best "peer!"