Microsoft made it official: they will add support to what they call ORTC API for WebRTC.

This announce generated a lot of buzz and definitively made Microsoft one of the biggest player in the “RTC for web” panorama with Google and Ericsson (the real WebRTC precursor). But what about business adoption?

During the last two years the standard evolved and a lot of work on the standard has been done adding features like getUserMedia (a standard way to capture media) and on browser adoption. Chrome was the first browser to implement WebRTC adding it as optional fist and then as a standard feature on the following releases. Then Firefox and Opera came. Microsoft and Apple showed little interest in the topic waiting for the communities early adoption feedbacks.

The biggest initial concerns were about security (partially solved with the SRTP mandatory usage), codecs and architecture. About codecs Google proposed to use G.711, G.722 and Opus on Audio an VP8 (WebM video codec) for video. Firefox and Opera already embedded those codecs so apparently no problems but somebody started thinking on how to use WebRTC not just for C2C. That’s the Cisco case: they realized that every browser could become an audio and video device and potentially could be used as a video endpoint for business. That was exactly what their customer started to ask and they wanted to become one of the WebRTC game players. Then, a big concern to solve: codecs Google proposed for audio and especially for video were not the ones used by Cisco products and in general in enterprise VOIP. About audio codecs the concern was limited as far as G.711 and G.722 were there but what about video? Cisco was for H.264 and Google for VP8/VP9. As far as H264 is non license free, Cisco decided to propose to the community an opensource version of h264 (openH264) to let them embed into their browsers. Firefox actually is the only one that did that. What’s not clearly said is openH264 just support the baseline version of h264 and not the high quality levels.

About architecture, as far as WebRTC is fully peer-to-peer and connectionless and passive to NAT traversal problems, it requires internet services like STUN and TURN to work. This requirement together with the mandatory stream encryption (SRTP) makes WebRTC quite hard to be easily adopted by company TLC groups.

That was the scenario and the business concerns before Microsoft announcement. And if you think the puzzle wasn’t complex enough, they’ve added another piece: “we’ll support WebRTC ORTC”, but what’s exactly ORTC? It’s claimed to be WebRTC 1.1 or 2.0, at the moment still a draft driven by the community. It will take time to be standardized, accepted and implemented by the other browser vendors. By the way Microsoft vision now seems to be very clear after another couple of announcements, skype for web and skype for business: they will move on with a skype centric approach on C2C, B2B and B2C market trying to push skype usage on every context. ORTC and video codec adoption are then becoming important topics and show stopper for their vision. Microsoft is now trying to fill the technology gap claiming plugins for all the browsers including IE (they still haven’t announced which version of IE will include ORTC features) demonstrating that, at the moment it’s just a matter of generating rumors, the time for real clientless communication still has to come.

Summarizing

-) WebRTC will be the leading collaboration standard for the future browsers. We just need to wait until the various vendors agree on which WebRTC. It will take some time.
-) A big challenge on video codecs will take place among the vendors to decide which is the best and which will be the best. Justin Uberti, WebRTC technical leader on his last g+ post claims that the WebRTC working group agreed on the mandatory adoption of both VP8 and H264 on all the WebRTC compliant browser. Will Microsoft be a part of that? We’ll see.
-) Apple is still out of any discussion

Said that I think that the standard is now ready for C2C with a lot of compatibility restrictions, but I cannot state that WebRTC is ready for B2B or even worse B2C. The big players are not filling a big gap leaving to third party products the hard work to really reach a clientless and transparent user centric approach to real time communication over web.

References

http://www.webrtc.org/
http://ortc.org/
http://blogs.skype.com/2014/10/27/bringing-interoperable-real-time-communications-to-the-web/
http://disruptivewireless.blogspot.co.il/2014/10/microsoft-now-definitely-supporting.html
http://bloggeek.me/microsoft-ie-ortc-webrtc-skype-h-264/
http://blogs.skype.com/2014/11/14/please-welcome-skype-for-web-beta/
http://blogs.skype.com/2014/11/11/introducing-skype-for-business/
https://plus.google.com/+JustinUberti/posts/gjGYHUtYWgA