It’s the Great Convergence! That is, the convergence of the IoT and WebRTC. “From telemedicine to smart cars, digital homes and industrial monitoring, the explosive growth of IoT has created exciting new business opportunities for WebRTC, real time calls and messaging,” says Ivelin Ivanov, CEO and Co-Founder of Telestar. Ivelin will be one of the featured speakers at our @WebRTCSummit, to be held Nov 4-5 as part of the overall @CloudExpo @ThingsExpo conference and exhibition Nov 4-6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA.
In his session, Ivelin promises to share “some of the new revenue sources that IoT created for Restcomm – the open source telephony platform from Telestax.”
Unmistaken Identity
@WebRTCSummit Conference Chair Peter Dunkley, based in the UK at Acision, says “we are reaching the end of the beginning with WebRTC and real systems using this technology have begun to appear. One challenge that faces every WebRTC deployment–in some form or another–is identity management.”
“For example,” he says, “if you have an existing service – possibly built on a variety of different PaaS/SaaS offerings – and you want to add real-time communications you are faced with a challenge relating to user management, authentication, authorization, and validation. Service providers will want to use their existing identities, but these will have credentials already that are (hopefully) irreversibly encoded.”
Peter will look at how this identity problem can be solved and discuss ways to use existing web identities for real-time communication in his session.
Can You Hear Me Now?
Representing another dimension of convergence, Keith McFarlane of LiveOps asks, “Can call centers hang up the phones for good?”
His session will focus on how Intuitive Solutions did just that. “WebRTC enabled this contact center provider to eliminate antiquated telephony and desktop phone infrastructure with a pure web-based solution, allowing them to expand beyond brick-and-mortar confines to a home-based agent model,” he says.
“Since the initial buzz of WebRTC, the ability to enable browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat and P2P file sharing without plugins has been touted as a potential game changer for many industries,” McFarlane notes. “What are the parameters around this technology and its placement? Is it secure enough for prime time? Will WebRTC magnify OTT threat for telcos? Is WebRTC really that big of a deal for consumers?”
Clear Conference Calls? Whaaat?
The convergence also implies collaboration—lots of collaboration—and speaker Alan Kraemer of Technology Marketing notes that “while great strides have been made relative to the video aspects of remote collaboration, audio technology has basically stagnated. Typically all audio is mixed to a single monaural stream and emanates from a single point, such as a speakerphone or a speaker associated with a video monitor.”
Alan will have a very cool demo of “spatial conferencing” with WebRTC, in which confernce-call attendees can pinpoint the locations of all participants, thereby eliminating much of the mass confusion found in these calls.
“The concept of a small speaker unit placed in front of the conference participant that can create a full three dimensional sound field with user interaction supporting free placement of individual conference participants anywhere within that field is introduced,” he says. “This is integrated with WebRTC to create a seemless interactive video or teleconference experience that, from an acoustic standpoint, closely resembles the experience of a live meeting in a conference room.”
The P2P Shift
Yet another aspect of WebRTC convergence and where it’s going will be presented by Erik Lagerway of Hookflash. “P2P RTC will impact the landscape of communications, shifting from traditional telephony style communications models to OTT (Over-The-Top) cloud assisted & PaaS (Platform as a Service) communication services,” he says.
“The P2P shift will impact many areas of our lives, from mobile communication, human interactive web services, RTC and telephony infrastructure, user federation, security and privacy implications, business costs, and scalability. This presentation will walk through the shifting landscape of traditional telephone and voice services to the modern P2P RTC era of OTT cloud assisted services.”