Vocalcom and Google collaborate on a revolutionary feature for contact center solutions using WebRTC and Chromebooks

The collaboration combines Vocalcom’s expertise in contact center software solutions with Google’s expertise in Web applications and Chromebooks to enable greater simplicity, flexibility and cost efficiency in contact center operations.

PRWEB) February 05, 2015

Vocalcom leverage the WebRTC standard and drive a 21st Century approach to communications and speed collaboration, bringing the flexibility to quickly and cost effectively equip customer service representatives and for increased productivity and enhanced financial performance.

The Vocalcom WebRTC contact center solution brings a wealth of advantages to contact centers including increased ease-of-use, rapid connectivity, and cost efficiency as agents are able to connect quickly and efficiently from anywhere with customers in real-time across multiple channels. For the customer, any web browser may be used as WebRTC works easily and efficiently across multiple platforms, allowing for a seamless customer experience.

The integrated technology would let customer-support reps access the Vocalcom contact center software—hosted in the cloud or in a local network—via the Chrome browser. Tapping the Chrome browser’s native support of WebRTC, users will be able to communicate with audio and video without having to install additional software.

The Vocalcom WebRTC contact center software solution is the first cloud contact center with zero on-premise hardware, software, and telephony infrastructure. This development allows contact center agents to use the Vocalcom cloud on Chromebooks through WebRTC-enabled interfaces. Within a single window, the solution puts the customer record front and center, with the most critical and recent information in clear view. The agent may then search easily for more details, as all of the customer’s interaction history—across all channels—is there in one place. Customers may then initiate contact with a company representative or customer service agent directly from the website without a need for installing an additional third-party application.

WebRTC technology, heavily supported and promoted by Google, allows audio and video conferencing applications to run on browsers via Javascript APIs without needing special plugins or add-ons. WebRTC is a communications standard that enables Web application developers to write rich, real-time multimedia applications on the Web, and it does not require additional plug-ins, downloads or installations because the Web browser is the application itself. The standard comes fully equipped with all that is necessary to engage in real-time, multimedia communications—whether it be via phone, video call, email, chat, SMS, or social media.

Making it easy makes it better, said Anthony Dinis, CEO of Vocalcom, in a statement. “Self-service features, the contact center, social and mobile have never been intimately connected. Cloud-enabled solutions, like this one, drive TCO savings, increase flexibility, accelerate ramp time and make it easier to implement secure agent desktops. By introducing WebRTC in the contact center world, Vocalcom will allow companies to gain that flexibility and cost efficiency using our leading contact center capabilities accessible through Chromebooks.

Comparing video conferencing services

With so many video conferencing services available, it can be difficult to determine which is right for your enterprise. Use this chart to help decide which service meets your needs.

Video has become an integral part of an enterprise's unified communications strategy. Enterprises are increasingly deploying video conferencing services to reduce communication and travel costs, meet the communication needs of remote workers and enhance collaboration among employees.

But enterprises are looking to get more than just video calls from their conferencing services. They are looking for video conferencing services that create virtual meeting spaces to encourage true collaboration with features like document sharing, mobile integration and high definition video support. Enterprises that deploy video conferencing services to promote collaboration see benefits that range from reduced travel costs to increased productivity.

But how do you know which conferencing service is right for your enterprise? There are many video conferencing services on the market that offer a variety of advantages. Some services offer basic features like chat and document sharing, while others offer more advanced features like recording and streaming. It can be difficult for enterprises to determine which service best suits their needs. Our chart compares the features and prices of several popular video conferencing services to help you in your decision-making process.

Mozilla launches Firefox 35 with WebRTC

With this week’s rollout of Firefox 35, Mozilla is taking a bold step toward reclaiming the relevance that Firefox once commanded. Key to that effort is the organization’s move to

take a standard technology called WebRTC and add it to Firefox to let users make voice and video calls from their browser.
The new feature, announced Tuesday, is called Hello, and it’s not just Mozilla’s desire to sound friendlier. It’s the organization’s latest salvo in a war against browser obscurity.

Hello, Hello
Firefox Hello lets the user initiate person-to-person conference calls directly from the browser. Although the user initiates the call on Firefox, the recipient can use any modern browser that supports WebRTC (Real-Time Communication). WebRTC is an open standard adopted by the W3C community for use in HTML5 that allows Web sites to incorporate video and audio conferencing tools into their pages.

The user initiating the call needs to have signed up for a Firefox account, though the call itself isn’t managed by a server that keeps a directory of account holders. Instead, Hello triggers the sending of an email to the call recipient, which contains a link to a server managed by Telefónica. When the recipient clicks that link, a signal is sent back to the initiator’s Firefox browser, and the session can begin.

The call recipient finds herself on a page with a blazing Firefox logo.
As the Web transitions from a place for reading pages to a platform for running apps, browsers such as Firefox must evolve into a new kind of framework. The danger for Mozilla’s effort to raise its profile is that any software framework—like Java, AIR, .NET, or WinRT—can slip quietly behind the scenes, joining anti-malware agents and background tools that users may forget are running in the background.

As WebRTC was originally envisioned, when a Web site wanted to communicate directly with users via voice or video, it could establish two-way communications using WebRTC, by way of components like buttons embedded into pages. For this scheme to work, all the major browser manufacturers—Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Opera Software—had to come on board, and they did. That cooperation is what makes it possible for Mozilla’s Hello feature to let Firefox users dial up the users of its competitors’ browsers.

But now that WebRTC technology has proven its worth, it’s being perceived by some manufacturers as the key to making mobile devices that are not telephones competitive with smartphones. A device running the new Firefox OS, for example, could be sold by everyday retailers without the need for carrier contracts—or the “bloatware” sometimes featured on phones subsidized by carriers.

The sudden WebRTC market

For now, Hello is a way for users to exploit WebRTC conferencing without waiting for Web sites to embed it into their pages first. Assuming the Firefox user is willing to add the Hello button to her toolbar (it must be done manually), it does give Hello a prominent position in front of any other WebRTC method available to Firefox users, which could make Hello more competitive to whatever else may come along—for example, a chat button on a Web page.


Will there be competition? Yes, and it’s coming in force.

Last October, Microsoft announced plans to incorporate a form of real-time communication said to be compatible with WebRTC, called ORTC, into a future version of Internet Explorer. It will be given the Skype brand, even though ORTC is not the P2P technology historically associated with Skype.


Microsoft then followed up that announcement the following month with the declaration that its Skype brand would absorb both its Lync business conferencing and its RTC efforts, signaling that Skype may not only become a featured brand in Windows 10 but in its browser as well. We may learn more about this on Jan. 21, when Microsoft unveils more details on its next operating system in an event at its Redmond, Washington headquarters.

Google and Avaya to bring Chromebooks and WebRTC to call centers

Google and Avaya are chasing companies seeking to install or upgrade call center systems, promising them easier and more affordable deployments via Chromebooks and a WebRTC interface to the Avaya customer support software.

The integrated systems would let customer-support reps access the Avaya call center software—hosted in the cloud or in a local network—via the Chrome browser. Tapping the Chrome browser’s native support of WebRTC, users will be able to communicate with audio and video without having to install additional software.

“As we move to omni-channel support, incorporation of video is essential for contact centers,” said Joe Manuele, a vice president at Avaya.

WebRTC technology, heavily supported and promoted by Google, allows audio and video conferencing applications to run on browsers via Javascript APIs without needing special plugins or add-ons.

For example, it will be possible for contact center staffers to launch one-to-many video conference sessions, and to route them to another agent while in progress without interrupting the broadcast, according to Manuele.

Avaya hopes the offering will attract new clients and prompt customers of its call center software to upgrade their systems, especially those looking to move away from traditional Windows desktop PCs loaded with local software or to replace thin, virtualized clients, and thus simplify their infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Google expects the partnership to help spur demand for Chromebook devices. Although Google doesn’t make Chromebooks, the company generates revenue licensing and IT administration software for the devices.

The Avaya-Google bundle includes the Avaya Agent for Chrome software, and the Google Chrome management console. It can be ordered now and will ship in the coming weeks. It’s expected to start at $30 per concurrent user, per month, for a three-year subscription, or $900 for a perpetual license.

Chromebook devices are sold separately. The partnership currently doesn’t include a specific deal with any hardware vendor, but any Google-authorized Chrome device—Chromebook laptops and Chromebox desktops alike—will work with the call center software. Hardware makers that market Chrome devices include HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer and Toshiba. “There’s a great set of Chrome devices out there for the enterprise,” said Rajen Sheth, Director of Product Management, Chrome for Business and Education at Google.

One customer with concrete plans to adopt the Avaya Agent for Chrome is MeadWestvaco, a logistics company with customers in 100 countries that, according to Avaya, wants to simplify and modernize its contact center systems.

Introduction to WebRTC architecture

What is ICE?

Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) is a framework to allow your web browser to connect with peers. There are many reasons why a straight up connection from Peer A to Peer B simply won’t work. It needs to bypass firewalls that would prevent opening connections, give you a unique address if like most situations your device doesn’t have a public IP address, and relay data through a server if your router doesn’t allow you to directly connect with peers. ICE uses some of the following techniques described below to achieve this:

What is STUN?

Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) (acronym within an acronym) is a protocol to discover your public address and determine any restrictions in your router that would prevent a direct connection with a peer.

The client will send a request to a STUN server on the internet who will reply with the client’s public address and whether or not the client is accessible behind the router’s NAT.

What is NAT?

Network Address Translation (NAT) is used to give your device a public IP address. A router will have a public IP address and every device connected to the router will have a private IP address. Requests will be translated from the device’s private IP to the router’s public IP with a unique port. That way you don’t need a unique public IP for each device but can still be discovered on the internet.

Some routers will have restrictions on who can connect to devices on the network. This can mean that even though we have the public IP address found by the STUN server, not anyone can create a connection. In this situation we need to turn to TURN.

What is TURN?

Some routers using NAT employ a restriction called ‘Symmetric NAT’. This means the router will only accept connections from peers you’ve previously connected to.

Traversal Using Relays around NAT (TURN) is meant to bypass the Symmetric NAT restriction by opening a connection with a TURN server and relaying all information through that server. You would create a connection with a TURN server and tell all peers to send packets to the server which will then be forwarded to you. This obviously comes with some overhead so is only used if there are no other alternatives.

What is SDP?

Session Description Protocol (SDP) is a standard for describing the multimedia content of the connection such as resolution, formats, codecs, encryption, etc so that both peers can understand each other once the data is transferring. This is not the media itself but more the metadata.

What is an Offer/Answer and Signal Channel?

Unfortunately WebRTC can’t create connections without some sort of server in the middle. We call this the Signal Channel. It’s any sort of channel of communication to exchange information before setting up a connection, whether by email, post card or a carrier pigeon... it’s up to you.

The information we need to exchange is the Offer and Answer which just contains the SDP mentioned above.

Peer A who will be the initiator of the connection, will create an Offer. They will then send this offer to Peer B using the chosen signal channel. Peer B will receive the Offer from the signal channel and create an Answer. They will then send this back to Peer A along the signal channel.

What is an ICE candidate?

As well as exchanging information about the media (discussed above in Offer/Answer and SDP), peers must exchange information about the network connection. This is known as an ICE candidate and details the available methods the peer is able to communicate (directly or through a TURN server).

The entire exchange in a complicated diagram

With Webrtc, the Skype's probably won't the utmost

Analysts expect WebRTC will be a market worth $4.7 billion by 2018

WebRTC, a free browser-based technology, looks set to change the way we communicate and collaborate, up-ending telecoms firms, online chat services like Skype and WhatsApp and remote conferencing on WebEx.

Web Real-Time Communication is a proposed Internet standard that would make audio and video as seamless as browsing text and images is now. Installed as part of the browser, video chatting is just a click away – with no need to download an app or register for a service.

WebRTC allows anyone to embed real-time voice, data and video communications into browsers, programs - more or less anything with a chip inside.

 Already, you can use a WebRTC-compatible browser like Mozilla's Firefox to start a video call just by sending someone a link.

Further ahead, WebRTC could add video and audio into all kinds of products and services, from GoPro cameras and educational software to ATMs and augmented reality glasses. Imagine, for example, wanting to buy flowers online and being able, at a click, to have the florist display arrangements to you live via a video link.

WebRTC will be a market worth $4.7 billion by 2018, predicts Smiths Point Analytics, a consultancy. Dean Bubley, a UK-based consultant, reckons over 2 billion people will be using WebRTC by 2019, some 60 percent of the likely Internet population.

How to start chatting with webRTC, the no-hassle, in-browser voice and video tech

There's a relatively new technology built in to most browsers that could revolutionize the way you talk with your friends and family. Called webRTC, the HTML 5-based tech could one day replace the need for third-party plugins from services like Google Hangouts or Skype, offering voice and video chat capabilities natively in your browser.

Even better, most implementations of the technology don't require an account of any kind. Chats take place on a web page that you set up on a site that supports webRTC. To get chatting all you have to do is share a link to the web page and you'll be up and running in no time. Talk about hassle free!

If you'd like to give webRTC a try, here's how to get started.

Your browser

Many current browsers for the PC support webRTC, including Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Apple's Safari doesn't and neither does Microsoft's Internet Explorer; however, Microsoft-owned Skype plans on supporting webRTC in the future with its newly announced Skype for Web project.

If you want to go mobile Chrome, Firefox, and Opera support webRTC on Android. On iOS you can try Bowser.