The impact of WebRTC is here and is rapidly growing. And opinions on the state of WebRTC are changing as the market matures.
WebRTC Survey
The Dialogic survey, "2014 WebRTC Impact Survey" solicited opinions from service providers and application developers to assess their thoughts about WebRTC and the effect on their business models. This is a follow on to a similar 2013 survey.
Some of the significant findings of the survey are:
• 57% of the respondents have solutions in development and about 20% have launched a WebRTC solution.
• When comparing WebRTC to Adobe Flash, about 60+% felt that WebRTC was superior.
• About 60+% predicted that WebRTC interactions would be social rather than machine to machine.
• The leading social interactions would be in education, healthcare, and adult entertainment.
• Another entertainment prediction is that major sports events will be viewed with group video conferencing during the event.
The Dialogic survey posed several questions for the respondents:
How significant is WebRTC to your product or services roadmap?
2014 Dialogic Survey Response
Studying the comparison between the 2013 and 2014 results shows that respondents believe the significance of WebRTC has decreased slightly in the last year. This is not surprising. Whenever a new idea or technology surfaces, there is much excitement. This excitement is based on perceived value and benefits. After a year investigating and applying WebRTC, the respondents buy in and excitement is tempered. This does not mean WebRTC interest is dying. It means that the respondents are gaining a more realistic view of WebRTC's value for products and services.
How will we use WebRTC?
2014 Dialogic Survey Response
There was no question like this in the 2013 survey. For the nearly two-thirds who envision human-to-human interactions dominating, the vision is to deliver advanced conference calls with content, customer service (contact center) use cases and a variety of other multimedia experiences. Machine-to-machine (M2M) interaction appears to have very little attraction for the developers, therefore there is not much incentive to deliver products for this community with WebRTC as the underlying technology.
What markets will WebRTC impact?
2014 Dialogic Survey Response
The results comparing the 2013 and 2014 surveys show some changes in the markets that will benefit from WebRTC deployment. Education has decreased while healthcare has increased. Adult entertainment and financial services have increased. Online gaming, not a big enterprise revenue producer, has dropped by about 1/3.
I think that financial services, especially for high-value customers, will see a lot of investment. I would draw the same conclusion for healthcare. Adult entertainment may be a profitable market as well.
Who will generate the most revenue with WebRTC?
2014 Dialogic Survey Response
Initially the developers and application providers--not the enterprise--stand to gain the early revenue. Revenue for the enterprise will come from the use of WebRTC applications, especially in customer/user interfaces, not from WebRTC itself. The survey respondents are predicting that tool and infrastructure vendors, website and app providers, and communications service providers are the three groups that will benefit most from WebRTC adoption.
Conclusion
WebRTC should be viewed as a tool, not an end in itself. Eventually the term WebRTC will mean very little to the enterprise customer/user. In fact, WebRTC may be a technical term in the future that has no real meaning for the customer/user.
WebRTC will not be mentioned when the new applications are promoted. It will be the applications themselves that will be of interest, not the technology underling those applications. As an example, HTML5 is an underlying technology but does not have any attractiveness to the customer/user, only to developers, even though many applications use HTML5.
