Virtual Office Resource

As I wrote in the second quarter issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, real-time communications is expected to increasingly become part and parcel of existing business processes and applications, not supplements to them. Results from a recent survey conducted by Vidyo (News - Alert) and WebRTC.ventures paint a similar picture.

“The Rise of Embedded Video Communications: Trends in Video-Enabled Apps” effort is based on the input of 166 CIOs, CTOs, engineering directors, front-end developers, and general managers. And 49 percent of them said platform-as-a-service is their top choice for embedded video projects planned for the next 12 months.

More than 45 percent of the bunch said they are working on telehealth applications with embedded video. “Care providers use a communications PaaS to thread real-time video throughout clinical workflows to simplify the engagement process for both the patient and the clinician,” Vidyo and WebRTC.ventures said.

Forty percent said they embed video into collaboration and online meeting applications. Thirty-five percent add it to contact center workflows, and 30 percent in distance learning solutions. Embedding video into field service, gaming, technical support, and webcast and webinar applications is also of interest.

In fact, the U.S. video communications PaaS market is expected to be worth $1.7 billion in 2020, up from $60 million last year.

“In the new mobile-first world, users are expecting communications directly within the application itself, for simplicity, context, and integration to the actual app values,” Phil Edholm (News - Alert), president and founder of PKE Consulting, noted in his standing column Real-Time Web Solutions in the first quarter issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY.

Amazon Mayday, which includes screen sharing and video, is an example of an application that works directly in the app, he said. Edholm referred to communications that work within an app, and without the need for the PSTN, as CPaaS 2.0 solutions. They are superior to PSTN-based CPaaS solutions, he said, because their cost structure and margins are not determined by PSTN dialing pricing and the cost-per-minute models of the past.

Companies like GENBAND (News - Alert) (with its Kandy effort) and Twilio (which built a $1 billion business around APIs that allow developers to more easily bring messaging, voice, and now video to their applications) have helped popularize the idea of embedding communications into applications. At the same time, there’s a lot of discussion by both new and established players about embedded communications.

For example, 8x8 (News - Alert) in March announced its acquisition of team collaboration company Sameroom. Although Sameroom has a team collaboration tool, 8x8 explained it was primarily interested in the company’s ability to connect other team collaboration solutions in the marketplace such as Slack and Skype (News - Alert).