Businesses that want to grab the opportunities to improve services and slash cost need to bone up on WebRTC, a free browser-based voice and video support included in Firefox and Chrome, experts at the recent Enterprise Connect 2013 conference in Orlando said.
One of the industries where WebRTC may have the most potential is in the call centre business where customers seeking assistance on Web sites can connect with a live representative through voice and video and share computer screen views with the representative as well.
WebRTC will transform voice and video from mere applications to features, according to Jan Liden, product manager for Google who is working on the WebRTC standard.
Business decision makers should consider how real-time data and video can improve their business processes and work with their existing systems, according to Cullen Jennings, a Cisco Systems distinguished engineer who is also working on the Web RTC standard. He said over the next year, organizations will begin seeing more WebRTC-enabled applications.
According to Valentine Matula, senior director of Avaya Inc., in about six years firms should expect the proliferation of applications incorporating WebRTC written by third party developers.
During a demo at the conference, Avaya showed the technology working with its Contact Centre platform. With only a WebRTC-enabled Chrome browser and no other client, a PC was able to initiate a video connection with an agent machine through the Contact Centre server.
WebRTC is able to determine the type of traffic it is handling and select the codec that will optimize it given the network’s performance.
