Dialogic (News - Alert) has a large portfolio of telephony infrastructure and developer enabling products that range from softswitches, gateways, SBCs, telephony and fax boards and media servers. These products are sold to service providers, enterprises, contact centers and developers. The company, which has a long history in enabling communications media processing for new development communities, sees WebRTC as a core catalyst for bringing real-time communications to the enormous web development community. WebRTC, the company notes, also is helping traditional telephony developers move into the larger web development world. We recently spoke with Chad Hart (News - Alert), senior director of product marketing at Dialogic, to get the details on the company’s WebRTC strategy and the direction of the larger industry.
Tell us about Dialogic’s WebRTC strategy.
Dialogic has made WebRTC one of the core components of our PowerMedia XMS media server solution. PowerMedia XMS is a fully functional and complaint SIP media server and media resource function that includes WebRTC support. Traditional telephony developers use PowerMedia XMS to extend their media-centric applications with capabilities like interworking WebRTC with SIP (i.e. gatewaying) and transcoding between traditional VoIP and WebRTC codecs. Developers can also take advantage of many real-time media processing features to power their applications. PowerMedia XMS has full WebRTC support across all of its core media server capabilities, including multi-party audio and videoconferencing, audio and video recording, video transrating to minimize bandwidth, and video transizing to adapt to different screen sizes.
When and why did Dialogic embrace WebRTC?
The team was always very excited about the prospects of combining the best of the web with telephony with WebRTC. Fortunately, customer demand quickly pushed us further down that path. It has always been a core tenant of our PowerMedia XMS program to have early support for new codecs. Dialogic first dipped its toes into the WebRTC waters in early 2013 with support for the VP8 codec. We immediately saw a lot of interest in using our media server for WebRTC video applications. As a result, we accelerated development on WebRTC and quickly introduced more comprehensive WebRTC support throughout the product along with a starter Javascript-based WebRTC API. Since then, WebRTC has continued to be a primary driver for the product. At the June WebRTC Expo we announced we had more than 90 WebRTC engagements across a broad audience of developers, contact centers, and service providers. This is still an early stage market, but the broad interest and rapidly growing demand for the technology continues to propel our investment in WebRTC.
How are some of Dialogic’s customers using the company’s WebRTC-based solutions?
One of my favorite examples is a dance studio in Bogota, Colombia. The studio was very successful and they wanted to grow, but opening up new physical locations is very expensive and hard to manage. Instead, they turned toward the web with WebRTC for growth. Today they use WebRTC to provide remote lessons, allowing them to virtually expand their footprint and bring in new students they couldn’t previously reach.
Tell us about your example involving a “hyper-demanding environment.”
One of our customers – a tier 1 service provider in the U.K., sets up and manages high-powered trading turret systems that bridge audio from a dozen or more different live feeds. These turrets are expensive – costing many $1,000s or more. They are also physically tethered, which is becoming very limiting in today’s increasingly mobile workplace. To address these challenges, the service provider is piloting a web-based turret. This allows them to lower their capital outlays for infrastructure, giving them a more competitive offer. In addition, the flexibility of the WebRTC turret also allows them to sell into more environments where a large, physical turret would never make sense. They can now sell into remote branches, smaller enterprises, even home offices – dramatically increasing their addressable market for a relatively small software development cost.
What else do people need to know about WebRTC?
Even though much of WebRTC is peer-to-peer in nature, there are many use cases that involve server-side media processing. Some of those use cases as mentioned earlier are because of technical constraints and limitations in mobile device battery-life, processing power, and bandwidth. Others, like recording, may be imposed by legal and compliance requirements. PowerMedia XMS is the media server for these use cases today and will be the WebRTC media server for future use cases as they emerge.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
