According to the 2014 WebRTC Impact Survey, conducted by Dialogic Inc., 90 percent of telecom experts predict WebRTC’s runaway popularity within five years. The results track progress among service providers and application developers as they deploy and monetize new customer offerings, confirming that one out of every five respondents has launched a commercial WebRTC solution within the last year.

“This year, we’ve seen communications leaders heralding WebRTC’s ability to simplify the delivery of rich media communications, and that enthusiasm echoes in the survey feedback from our customers,” said Andrew Goldberg, senior vice president of marketing and strategy for Dialogic. “We see enormous potential for entrants to disrupt the communications market with browser-based multi-party voice and video services powered by WebRTC, especially as wireless telcos look for ways to outmaneuver the new, social-media driven Webco model”.

The research provides confirmation of the adoption and commercial viability of WebRTC, Google’s open source project for real-time communications. The results clearly point to how enterprises and service providers have embraced the technology to address the market need for high-quality video, voice and messaging communications.

The survey asked key decision-makers in the service provider and telecom applications development communities to assess the impact of WebRTC on their go-to-market strategies. Contrary to predictions by some in the industry that the majority of WebRTC interactions are machine-to-machine or between machines and humans, two-thirds of respondents are preparing for exchanges that will be largely social, with it beneficially changing the way we view sporting events and multi-party gaming, and it opening the door for new Webco business models that serve data-driven communications. Other survey findings include:

• Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed predict WebRTC will be infused in our lives in some way within five years, whether we all realize it today or not.
• More than 80 percent believe WebRTC will have a significant impact on their products or services.
• More than a quarter of respondents consider education to be the most promising market, while a fifth of respondents are bullish that healthcare will reap rewards.
• According to two-thirds of those surveyed, WebRTC will indeed succeed due to it representing a technologically better or more appealing “open” alternative to Web-oriented real-time communications technologies such as Adobe Flash or Java Applets.