Although spring is still a long way off, at least in terms of the weather, you can already feel a hint of change in the air. You may not have noticed it – but it heralds the arrival of WebRTC.

Many people won’t know too much about WebRTC yet – it’s growing out of a deeply technical background and hasn’t yet reached the wider market. It may feel a bit ‘tekkie’, but perhaps there’s not much to worry about. After all, everything is overrated these days – so why the hype? It’s surely just the new trend and will go away on its own …

We think this is simply wrong. Our opinion is that this is the most disruptive market force since VoIP. We even go a step further – and think that many will be talking about WebRTC much more than VoIP before the end of the year.

For those who don’t know, WebRTC is the ability to communicate with audio and video directly from the web browser. The theory is that two or more internet browsers that are WebRTC capable can communicate directly with each other, users can talk to each other, see each other, and share files and screen content. It can be user to user, or even used for multi-user conferencing.

The thing is this: many browsers will natively support these capabilities. It’s even already available in Firefox and Chrome. That means there are already hundreds of millions of devices that can already communicate with each other, without a special network or special devices. It is estimated that there will be 800 million WebRTC-enabled devices by the end of the year and 3 billion by 2015. Still think that’s just a trend?

Of course, it’s not quite that simple, but the potential is there. WebRTC is challenging traditional PBXs and devices, and even the business models of carriers and service providers. Until now, many service providers have been worried about how to cope with the ‘OTT’ (Over the Top) attack from the IT world. With WebRTC there is no more OTT – everyone will be affected, even the OTTs themselves. There is simply no more need for any proprietary solutions for communication if the web browser does it ‘that way’.

At JTEL, we have been investing time in the creation of WebRTC solutions for several months. These will complement and supplement our existing ACD and IVR solutions. In parallel, we will continue to keep our readers informed about what’s going on. So come back soon to find out more about this exciting topic and what we at JTEL are doing with it!