Starting a New Year is always the perfect opportunity to plan for the future and look forward. It is also the occasion to do an inventory which sometimes leads to interesting finds. It is exactly what happened to us as we stumble upon an unpublished interview of Thomas Cottereau (@thomascottereau), our CEO for WebRTC Conference & Expo by Rachel Ramsey (@TMCrachel) from TMCnet.
BYOD, Apple, Microsoft, VP9, market adoption, all things related to WebRTC are uncompromisingly discussed in this interview we are sharing with you today.
- Rachel: Are you using WebRTC in a production application today?
Thomas: Yes, Weemo is an early adopter of WebRTC technologies. We are actively developing our solutions in parallel with the evolution of the proposed standard. Production deployments today are taking advantage of WebRTC technology across different browsers and mobile platforms.
- R: Tell us about the impact of WebRTC on your product line. Do you see a new market opportunity as a result of WebRTC?
T: WebRTC constitutes an important part of our product line especially to serve the markets where users (B2C/contact centers) are reluctant to download any piece of software. The technology choices we have made in our support of WebRTC are consistent with choices we have made before to deploy a real-time video cloud infrastructure that supports embedded video chat and multi-party video conferencing without the need to deploy any server software or hardware.
- R: How does WebRTC impact the BYOD market? Do you expect you are going to see Google gain more of a presence in the device world?
T: As Weemo already provides real-time video for Safari, Internet Explorer and iOS, the transition to WebRTC will be seamless for our clients. We are now leveraging the WebRTC capacity that exists currently in Chrome but we would love for WebRTC to become a standard and a capability accessible to anyone on any device.
- R: Does the lack of Apple and Microsoft commitment to deliver WebRTC in their products have a major impact on your WebRTC plans? Why or why not?
T: Weemo’s solution is built for compatibility across platforms without having to resort to gateways or expensive equipment to translate between native WebRTC browsers and those from these vendors. Our plans will not dramatically change since we expect to live in a world where the big device and platform vendors will continue to battle it out on the standards front to protect their technology investments and install base.
- R: Will every device and browser eventually support WebRTC in the future?
T: Nobody knows. There is no technical reason why it could not be and we would love it to be. However, this decision only belongs to the big guys.
- R: Does WebRTC represent a specific implementation strategy in the enterprise? (e.g., remote workers, call centers and other opportunities in the enterprise)
T: We believe the adoption of WebRTC will be driven by the software vendors as they integrate this capability to their product more than by the enterprises. Weemo is focused on extending the capability for enterprise software vendors and communications solution providers to embed real-time video chat and video conferencing in their applications through simple to use APIs and on top of a global scalable platform.
- R: How important is VP9 to your mobile strategy?
T: Weemo has optimized its VP8 codec implementation so that we can get it to run on most of the mobile platforms today. VP9 is a great improvement and we are happy to implement it to improve our offering. We already implemented VP9 in our development branch and are very excited with the great improvement of the bandwidth and the CPU consumption, currently in the 30 – 40% range.
- R: In theory, HTML5 and WebRTC can eliminate native apps. Do you have plans for native mobile application with WebRTC or the Google Media Engine?
T: We see more and more HTML5 apps coming in the mobile space but native apps haven’t said their last word. Weemo partners can choose between using our mobile SDK that can be compiled in any native app and leveraging WebRTC directly in HTML5 apps.
- R: Where do we stand on the adoption curve of WebRTC? Are we in the bowling alley? Still in the hype phase?
T: In terms of business usage, the market is still in the hype phase. There is no massive implementation at this time due to the evolving standard and the continuously changing implementations by the primary contributors Google and Mozilla, not to mention the live debate on the Mandatory to Implement (MTI) codec. But things are moving quite fast. The big changes will happen in 2014.
- R: How often do you have to explain what WebRTC is to your potential customers?
T: Most of the software vendors and developers we work with are well aware of WebRTC and its advantages. There has been a lot of communication around WebRTC among the tech community. They are also aware that it’s not a silver bullet solution given the very large install base of Internet Explorer in the enterprise and the pervasiveness of network topologies where WebRTC doesn’t work natively.
