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Ingate Systems Recounts the Potential for WebRTC to Transform the Customer Experience

SIP Trunking Featured Article

July 14, 2014


Ingate Systems Recounts the Potential for WebRTC to Transform the Customer Experience


By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

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As companies seek more ways to support customers across channels and with minimal effort, a lot of attention is being paid to the way the WebRTC standard, coupled with SIP, can enable a host of new capabilities. Such capabilities include IP telephony features and unified communications (UC), providing enterprises and their customers with presence, instant messaging, video conferencing with telepresence quality and IP-PBX (News - Alert) connections.


At the recent WebRTC  Conference & Expo event held June 17-19, 2014, at the Cobb Galleria in Atlanta, Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC, took a moment to speak with Steve Johnson, President of Ingate Systems (News - Alert) AB, a Swedish developer of firewall and session border controller (SBC) technology. Tehrani asked Johnson to recount the company’s storied telecommunications history and how the company moved into the WebRTC sphere.

“We started back in the 2001 time frame, selling SIP-based session border controllers,” said Johnson. “They weren’t called that at the time – we had a SIP firewall – but now they’re session border controllers that enable SIP into an enterprise. And those devices have become very prevalent and a very important part of any SIP deployment, which today really consists mostly of SIP trunking solutions, which provide benefits to enterprises who wish to reduce costs and to have better disaster recovery and a number of other things.”

Johnson noted that many companies today are now moving to SIP and SIP trunking, replacing PSTN, and reaping the benefits of these technologies in their bottom lines, while adding unified communications and collaborations technologies such as video, file sharing and more. For its part, SIP has been a boon to Ingate, as well.

“So what’s happening today is that WebRTC is coming along as a standard which has the ability or the potential to disrupt communications in a big way, much as SIP did before, but it potentially has an even bigger potential impact,” said Johnson. “We’re looking at WebRTC as being a way for people to communicate with one another, even on a peer-to-peer basis over time. That’s not going to happen immediately, but over time, that’s a potential.”

In the meantime, said Johnson, WebRTC can be seen as a way to transform the customer experience through browser-based communications that include features, such as audio, and audio/video between a company and its customers, without having to fuss with downloads. Customers can click a button on a website and initiate an audio or video session that keeps the customer in the context of why he or she reached out in the first place, with no need to pick up the phone or repeat the query to the agent.

“[WebRTC] is a very strong enabling technology to advance communications well beyond where it is today,” said Johnson.

One of the most interesting applications will be the use of video for customer support. Johnson cites the success of Amazon’s “Mayday” feature for the new Kindle Fire, allowing a customer to access a live video support session with the click of a button.

“It shows that there is a market for [video],” said Johnson. “There is a demand for a communication vehicle that is not strictly voice, but is potentially a more personal experience via video that people are just getting to understand and to implement in way like the Mayday button.”

For more information about WebRTC Conference & Expo, visit the Web page here.




Edited by Adam Brandt

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