What more can you possibly want?
I just love reading these titles on posts: “WebRTC: Not Ready For The Enterprise“.
The funny thing with this one is the reasons why WebRTC isn’t ready for the enterprise:
- No IE support
- Single company for support
- UI flexibility
Seriously?
Besides that IE issue, the rest is just irrelevant.
That single company for support? It is true in the enterprise for everything. But WebRTC is a technology. No one hires a technology in the enterprise – they hire a solution. And they usually do it through a vendor. One with an SLA in place. Oh, and if you need someone that takes care of all of these pesky support issues and server issues – I know a few vendors…
UI flexibility? Seriously? There’s no issue with the current UX of enterprise video conferencing system? Do you know of a single company in the world where all employees know how to go into a meeting room and start a video call? Sure – no need to touch those interfaces – they are so useless anyway.
But this isn’t what I really wanted to discuss here.
My main concern is with the point of view. We, the enterprise, are here. You come to us when you are ready.
That’s just wrong.
The enterprise world should have been a competitive one. A place where companies try to find an edge over one another. WebRTC may even represent such an edge to some companies. So how is “WebRTC not ready” exactly? Should have better codecs? Improved battery performance? Maybe support for smells as an additional sense it needs to cover?
I think we have an opposite problem – the enterprise. It just isn’t ready for WebRTC.
And it is a risky situation.
The enterprise wasn’t ready for presence and instant messaging.
The enterprise wasn’t ready for the iPhone and BYOD.
Maybe it is time to prepare the enterprise instead of the other way around?