Cisco, anticipating video tsunami, builds up network smarts

IDG News Service - Saying video will soon dominate all types of data networks, Cisco Systems Inc. today launched a multipronged effort to make its products better-suited for handling that traffic.

As is typical for Cisco, the strategy includes bringing functions into network infrastructure that have been carried out by software. But this initiative aims to address the main type of traffic that Cisco has said is now driving demand for its products: video and rich media content.

"Video is becoming the dominant traffic on networks at a very rapid rate," said David Hsieh, vice president of marketing for Cisco's Emerging Technologies group, which oversees new areas of innovation in the company. The video-related products announced today are among Cisco's stable of emerging technologies, which it looks to as possible big successes of the future. The announcement came as the company geared up for its C-Scape industry analyst conference, taking place tomorrow and Wednesday in San Jose.

Cisco said the new technologies being rolled out as part of the new initiative are designed for what it calls "medianets" -- service provider, enterprise and home networks that are optimized for video and rich media. It kicked off the effort with a hardware and software platform for adapting video and other media to many types of enterprise devices. It also announced new capabilities built into the recently announced ASR9000 edge router to improve home video coming over carrier networks.

Traditional Internet Protocol networks are designed to transport packets and do a good job of supporting the Web-surfing experience, said Suraj Shetty, Cisco's vice president of worldwide service provider marketing. But with video, he said, streams are more important than individual packets and users' expectations are different, so networks need to be changed to deliver a good experience. Earlier performance-enhancing technologies, such as MPLS, helped support video as one of many applications, Shetty said. Now it's time to address it as the main application, he said.

Cisco is the only company that has the broad capabilities to bring about that change, said Yankee Group Research Inc. analyst Zeus Kerravala. Such a major undertaking will bring the company into areas where standards don't exist or have to be adapted, but Cisco has proved adept at leading new specifications, he said. (Indeed, the company has been accused more than once of forcing its own technologies into industry standards.)

The company's biggest obstacle is likely to be the weak economy, which could make service providers and enterprises skittish about making the large capital investments needed to ready networks for high-quality video, Kerravala said.

The most significant product announced under the medianet strategy is the Cisco Media Experience Engine 3000, the first of a set of offerings that will make up the Cisco Media Processing platform for enterprises. The Media Experience Engine can take video content created for one platform and convert it for viewing on others, according to Cisco's Hsieh. For example, a meeting held over Cisco's Telepresence videoconferencing system, in high-definition video on large plasma screens, could be recorded and adapted automatically for playback on an employee's PC.