The technology and telecommunications industries are littered with cautionary tales of innovative companies surrendering market dominance due to their inability to react quickly enough to new and disruptive competitive forces.

The fate of BlackBerry, the one-time 800 pound gorilla of the mobile device market, currently hangs in the balance, the result of a deer-in-the-headlights response to Apple’s introduction of the consumer-friendly iPhone, or so surmises a consensus of industry observers.

Every couple of decades or so, the telecommunications industry goes through a technology transition – analog to digital, for example – that profoundly impacts the way services are created and delivered, as well as the business models behind them. The ongoing and steady distillation of communications functions and features into pure software, which can be executed on generic and elastic hardware resources, is one of those industry-altering transitions.

In just a few short years, the communications industry has been turned on its head. While traditional telecom operators often defined the manner in which subscribers would communicate – voice or SMS, for the most part – end users are now much more influential in calling the shots.

In the post-Supercomm world, tradeshows in North America have become focused on specific technology areas, rather than diffused across multiple segments of the industry. The WebRTC Conference & Expo in Atlanta, conducted at the end of June, was no exception. It’s hard to think of a hotter topic careening through the corridors of the communications industry these days than the rise of browser-based unified-communications.

Despite the widespread use in the past decade of IP-based communications systems known as IP PBXs, the TDM pipes that connect those enterprise platforms to the public network have only slowly been replaced by IP connections. For multiple reasons, the most prominent being the desire of some network operators to preserve a fairly hefty cash cow of TDM T1s, E1s and PRIs, this IP-based connectivity service – commonly referred to as SIP Trunking – is only now hitting its groove.

The excitement surrounding WebRTC continues to grow unabated. Innovation abounds and every day I am bombarded on the Twittersphere (in addition to multiple LinkedIn groups, RSS blog feeds and frequent webinars) with another product announcement or a new and interesting demonstration of the technology.   I am encouraged that so many share our opinion that WebRTC is a truly disruptive force.

As Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a major communications solutions provider, I am constantly identifying and investigating trends that indicate the direction of communications in our society. One trend that everyone planning for the future should understand is the generational shift in communications driven by the 18-29 demographic, known as GEN-Y.