Last week I attended the WebRTC Conference and Expo in Atlanta and came away very encouraged regarding the progress being made on WebRTC. I presented a keynote address on the disruptive value that WebRTC is creating, spawning new markets and ecosystems. It was great to see the audience reaction from my keynote and some of the discussions that it prompted.

One of my big surprises of the week was being honored as a recipient of the 2014 WebRTC Pioneer Award. I have dedicated a great deal of my personal and professional time to researching, learning and communicating about the benefits of WebRTC and to be recognized with the Pioneer Award was such a cool and rewarding honor.

The entire week at the show was a complete whirlwind, but the thing I am most excited about is that we are seeing more REAL WORLD WebRTC use cases. While there is still a heavy reliance on customer service and support (which is an easy use case), there are more creative uses being developed that link back to business processes and data channels – and these business models encourage me the most. The updated graphic includes approximately 80 new WebRTC companies and brings the total that I am tracking to near 200. I released my first chart only few months ago, so you can clearly see the momentum behind WebRTC.

In addition to being a keynote speaker, I also had the opportunity to participate on a number of panels that included representatives from Twilio, Dialogic, Tokbox and Temasys among others. The most interesting thing about my participation in the panel discussions is that we agreed on much more than we disagreed on. The clear consensus was that there is a rising tide around WebRTC and the industry is on the verge of realizing some of the opportunities we have all been discussing and working towards.  I also loved listening to other perspectives and gaining a better understanding of how various executives see the technology moving forward.

My three key takeaways from the WebRTC Conference and Expo were:

1. The realness of everything around WebRTC. It’s happening now and things are moving at a rapid rate.
2. Going forward the conference organizers need to select a definitive path for the show – either make it a developer show or a customer conference. Currently it is a vendor conference and I would like to see either a developer track or business/customer track (or both).
3. I really enjoyed the keynotes from Serge LaChapelle (Google) and Bernard Aboba (Microsoft) and wrote about both on my blog. Serge gave a great history lesson on how WebRTC came about within Google and it was interesting to hear Bernard describe Microsoft’s stance on Object RTC (ORTC) and how it relates to WebRTC. By the way, I stand by my prediction that Microsoft will announce support for WebRTC within 18 months (which may happen by some of the key parts of ORTC being adopted in the 1.0 spec).

I will wrap up by saying how much fun it was to show off the capabilities of our new KANDY Communications Platform as a Service at the show. We demonstrated the KANDY QuickStart Guide. As was the case at our Perspectives™14 Customer and Partner Summit earlier in the month, the feedback was extremely positive. We are looking forward to rolling out KANDY in the fall.