WebRTC, UC and SIP Will Produce a New Generation of Service Providers

 Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) go hand in hand. SIP is the real-time communication protocol for VoIP, which expands to include support for such things as video conferencing and instant messaging applications. Meanwhile, UC is made up of many similar applications such as video conferencing, presence and instant messaging (IM) – all which has opened up a world of seemingly endless possibilities of ways in which businesses can interact with their customers, TMCnet recently reported. It can be comparable to a car getting a new engine; UC is the car and SIP is the new engine, which work together to enhance its overall operation and efficiency.

Unified communications is only growing and gaining traction, and with it, its support for SIP. For example, a study revealed yesterday by an esteemed SIP provider shows that 78 percent of its respondents (targeted at enterprises) had either partially or fully deployed UC solutions, with most of the remainder planning to do so very soon.

Seeing how these two technologies are so complementary, it would seem silly not to regard one with respect to the other. Now with the emergence of WebRTC, or Web Real-Time Communications that gives Web browsers real-time communications capabilities (ie. audio/video conferencing)via Javascript APIs, SIP and UC are changing even more. WebRTC provides ways for businesses of all sizes to majorly change their communications, offering enterprises varied functionality, increased simplicity, economic benefits and improved quality, among other things, TMCnet recently reported.

One major plus of WebRTC in regards to SIP and UC is that it significantly improves application support for video and voice for both consumer and business use. In other words, while users once needed to download outside applications such as Skype to talk to one another, or say for Google (News - Alert) voice users who had to download a plugin for use, with WebRTC, browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox can talk directly to one another in a browser agnostic environment. For business end users, it significantly simplifies once complex business processes, allowing them to be able to hop onto a big business video conference call on the whim, for example.

Programmable Web recently took to the topic in a blog to note that this will make for an interesting future generation of communications service providers, adding that this technology is “critical for developers because instead of having to develop code to take advantage of communications features in every endpoint device on the network, they will be able to more simply invoke WebRTC running in the browser.”

“In fact, many folks think that WebRTC will help spawn a new class of communications service providers,” the blog confirms. Unified Office CEO Ray Pasquale supports this notion, saying that what we could very well see is “the emergence of a new class of more agile service providers that are taking advantage of technologies such as WebRTC, HTML5 and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to build customizable unified communications applications.”

The blog also cites GENBAND (News - Alert) CEO Charlie Vogt as saying during last week’s ITEXPO Miami 2013 conference that one of the best things about emerging technologies is that they take the risk out of deploying new unified communications applications. Vogt added that this has contributed to making the present “one of the most exciting times in communications,” after what he confesses was a rough past decade.

Together, the evolution of SIP, UC and WebRTC and the innovations they will bring will surely create unprecedented results in the communications space, delivering on a promise of true change in the industry – and soon.