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2016 WebRTC Reality Check Slated for Enterprise Connect

Once again my colleague Brent Kelly, president of KelCor, and I are delighted to host the fourth-annual WebRTC Conference Within a Conference at Enterprise Connect 2016 in Orlando, presenting a full day of what's what on WebRTC standards and protocols, including a timely reality check on the state of WebRTC in the enterprise.

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We'll kick off the conference on Monday, March 7, with a keynote by Hookflash executives Trent Johnsen, CEO and co-founder, and Erik Lagerway, co-founder. Trent and Erik, who both have been involved in WebRTC since its infancy, co-chair various W3C Working Groups on WebRTC.

Following the keynote we'll hear from Microsoft's Albert Kooiman, product marketing director, who will provide Microsoft's perspective on WebRTC. After that, experts from BroadSoft, Genband, Masergy, and Sprint will discuss the role service providers can play in helping enterprises benefit from WebRTC. We'll then dive into WebRTC operational issues around security, interoperability, and performance management, hearing from subject matter experts with Sonus and Callstats.io.

Once again this year we'll be featuring innovators in a session where we'll showcase a wide variety of WebRTC solutions for public safety, distance learning, team collaboration, and more. From there we'll look specifically at how WebRTC is helping companies improve customer service by enabling inbound voice and video calls, and what that means to contact center platforms. Finally, we'll wrap-up with our annual Locknote featuring a distinguished panel of WebRTC experts who will react to the day's sessions, and offer their own perspective on the technology's future.

As excited as I am for this session, I'm mindful of the fact that despite nearly four years of hype, WebRTC is thus far slow to catch on in the enterprise market, at least as a technology that companies actively investigate, plan for, and deploy. Just 4% of participants in the Nemertes' 2015-16 Enterprise Technology benchmark said they were using WebRTC today (that's from a pool of about 50 mid-to-large end-user organizations), while another 32% were evaluating. The percentage of evaluators did grow from 24% in 2014, but the percentage of those who have moved forward with deployments remains flat. This has led some industry analysts and pundits to question whether or not WebRTC has entered the "trough of despair" in the new technology hype cycle.

At the same time, an increasing number of companies are likely using WebRTC without even knowing it as the technology that underpins desktop and mobile UC solutions from vendors like Cisco and Unify, and even Facebook.

So my hope as we head into this year's conference is that we can bridge the hype-versus-reality gap. Our intention for the WebRTC Conference Within a Conference is to show attendees:

Perhaps more importantly, I hope attendees will come away with a renewed sense of interest in what WebRTC can offer them in the future, and how they can overcome browser limitations, codec battles, and other implementation constraints that have thus far tamped down enterprise excitement, and adoption.

I look forward to seeing many of you at Enterprise Connect in March and I hope you'll join us as we once again explore the world of WebRTC!

If you're planning on attending Enterprise Connect but haven't yet registered, then do so by Friday, Feb. 12, and save an additional $200 off the early bird rate. All you need to do is use the code NJPOST, and register here. The discount code is only valid for Entire Event and Tue-Thu Conference passes, and represents a total savings of $700 off the onsite price! As an added bonus, register three or more attendees from your company for even bigger savings.