With the recent announcement of the new Switchvox 6.0 software release, Digium is the first telephone systems maker to integrate WebRTC into their Switchvox Unified Communications platform. This is great news for the future of the premise-based business communications, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area.
What Digium Thinks of WebRTC
I had the chance to learn more about Digium’s embrace of WebRTC and how they see it coinciding with their overall strategy. Steve Sokol, Digium’s Director of Strategic Programs explains:
“WebRTC, more than any other technology to emerge in the past decade, has the potential to improve the way we all communicate. Where traditional telephony is limited by the context that can be expressed in a few touch-tone digits, WebRTC makes it possible to enhance the live communications experience with the rich contextual environment of the Web.
A call that was previously limited to voice can suddenly include video, screen sharing and the wealth of valuable data that surrounds the web experience – identity, history, interest and presence.
While there are still challenges to be addressed, it has already raised the bar for collaboration and unified communications solutions. We finally have the core components that we need to incorporate communications capabilities into the applications that we use every day.
Digium understands the opportunity that this presents – for ourselves, our partners and our customers, and has been working to build WebRTC into the core of our products. Asterisk has had WebRTC support since 2012. Last year we launched Respoke, a cloud platform that drastically simplifies the process of adding live communications features to web and mobile applications. Most recently we incorporated it into our Switchvox UC platform.”
More About Respoke
To learn more about Respoke, Digium has posted an interview with Charlie Wilson, General Manager of Respoke: http://bit.ly/1Oxmkch
For TeleDynamic, this is all very exciting news. The San Francisco Bay Area leads the U.S. in the adoption of cloud services, and our phone system customers have been asking for business communications solutions with cloud services. WebRTC is a big step in helping us provide those business phone solutions.
It will be interesting to see if other providers of business phone systems such as ShoreTel, Mitel and Avaya warm to WebRTC or continue to work in their proprietary PBX silos.
Stay tuned for an upcoming blog on ARI (Asterisk REST Interface), Digium’s other new tool for cloud PBX integrations.
