Gartner Hype Cycle, WebRTC Not Included

Galileo: It’s the Service, not the Technology, stupid

As people who lived on Earth and that was all they really knew, the Church and the scientists believed for many years that Earth is the center of the world and that everything revolves around it.

It took a lot of research and observations such as those of Galileo Galilei to provide enough evidence that the Heliocentrism theory has merit, that Earth is just another planet and like others it revolves around the sun.

We, those who live and breathe VoIP and communication sometimes think that the world revolves around WebRTC. Maybe that is why we try to associate everything possible to it, IOT, Big Data…and on the flipside of that, technologies that don’t live to their promise try to take WebRTC for a date thinking that given the hype around it they will be more noticed, do I hear IMS and RCS?

IOT – Saying that by 2016 90% of WebRTC companies and developers will monetize their products and services through IoT. Come on, I’ll just suggest you read why these 2 don’t really dance together.

Big Data – Right, with WebRTC it is possible to collect browsing and website interaction information, something that can be very useful. But collecting and storing information about users can be possible today. A lot of information can be collected from a chat session or from a voice call. Things like key words, vocal level that can be used as an indicator for customer satisfaction, IVR actions, number user called indicating webpage he visited or advertisement that called for this action, webpage chat started on and browsing history. All these can help improve future customer experience but not many contact centers are collecting this data today.

Mirror mirror on the wall

From time to time it is good to take a look at technology through a wide-angle lens. Gartner has done this work for us and came out with their 2014 hype cycle for emerging technologies.

Take a close look… Closer… Do you see WebRTC there?

Dave Mitchel took a stab at it and added his thought but Gartner decided to exclude it.

There are other technologies you can find there, IOT and Big Data of course. The thing is that they are much bigger in their impact and number of industries/companies/implementations they touch.

You might think that Gartner has ignored or missed WebRTC but in reality, Gartner analysts are well aware of it, they actually mention it in other segment drill-downs they do. My guess is that they view WebRTC as a core low level technology, one that will help many sectors but it wasn’t enough to put it on the larger, high-level technology map. Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong and maybe it will be there next year. In any case, it kind of puts things in perspective.

The important takeaway

WebRTC is not shown on the Gartner hype chart but it fits into many of the technologies mentioned there. The value of it depends on the application in which it is embedded and the value it brings through higher customer satisfaction and conversion rate to richer applications.