Writing as a guest on the Entanet blog Dan Winfield, Managing Director of Served Up Ltd, founder of the Voxhub telephony service and an ITSPA council member, says that WebRTC could mean resellers that are not already involved in delivering VoIP and collaboration solutions could miss the boat altogether.
WebRTC is a browser-based technology that makes it possible to create secure network-based peer-to-peer applications which can share media content such as audio, video, documents and messages. It is currently available only for some browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox and Opera, but is expected to become much more widely available as developers look to create new kinds of mobile apps.
“WebRTC is one of the enabling technologies that I’ve been waiting for, for a very long time,” says Dan Winfield, an ITSPA council member.
“It makes it reasonably straightforward to develop audio and video based applications in a web browser; something that up until now has required plugins. WebRTC provides the opportunity to mix telephony with the web browser based applications the world now uses. Yes, it can provide fantastic all in one page, video, messaging and conference apps that seem to be the fashion amongst the WebRTC start-ups, but the bigger opportunity is adding telephone features that are tightly integrated or ‘peppered’ into existing applications and services.
It often amazes me how separate the Internet and the telephony parts are in the Internet telephony market Telephones in the majority of businesses sit separate from the wealth of browser and app based services. Apart from IP traffic and the occasional CRM or click to call integration, the two share very little with each other. This makes no sense with the overwhelming majority of office workers spending most of their day looking at web browser based applications that gives them access to customer information, sales, support and other operational applications. This is where WebRTC will fit, bringing people and applications together, blurring the lines between the Internet and telephony.”
So, what are the challenges for the channel reseller if WebRTC really plays such an important part?
“The first challenge for the reseller will come from cloud providers outside of the traditional telephony market. Some of the big CRM service providers that already have the applications will definitely embrace telephony more in the future; it’s the missing piece from a lot of their offerings. They have control of the browser and can easily bring in WebRTC as an extension to their offerings. Assuming that these providers don’t bundle their own telephony platform, resellers will need to beef up on their investment in technology and ensure they can integrate where they need to. Resellers may also need to adapt how they provide services to be more like the cloud providers, with continuous evolvement and delivery of services. Cloud services tend to maintain user price points and work hard at increasing features over time to combat competition. Resellers tend to sell points in time solutions that don’t include continual improvements as part of the business model.
Another challenge I see for the reseller will be in their business mind-set. We cannot all have the long-term vision of Steve Jobs, but to really make something from technologies like WebRTC it requires ideas and the conviction to see them through. It can take a long time, with many cycles of improvement of code and sales strategy to get things right. Resellers like to make immediate returns on the things they sell and I’m not sure they have the patience to put up with the loss making early stages or identify with the Internet ethos of ‘build it and they will come’. Setting the pricing of new services is also a challenge, at least when reselling services you have a purchase price to guide you. For new services, resellers might need to try various pricing models, which might include giving it away to generate increased revenue in sales of existing services.
My final message regarding WebRTC, is that at the moment this is an opportunity for innovation. With no defined products or services in the reseller market, it’s up to the reseller to decide when to move. Waiting until someone else offers a service to resell might be the safe option but it will likely be only a small subset of services that are possible with such a flexible technology.
For our reseller partners and ourselves, WebRTC has the potential to bring an array of new opportunities to the VoIP market, with new technologies and applications emerging to take full advantage of this new technology. With that, we must expect an influx of competition which Dan warns is likely to come from existing cloud providers, but quite rightly states this doesn’t necessarily need to be viewed as a threat and could actually bring new working relationships and opportunities for resellers willing to embrace this emerging market. It’s an interesting industry development and one we will be watching closely!”