Enterprise Briefing

Industry watch

the rise and rise of networked video

Video is everywhere on the enterprise network these days: video streaming of the latest financials, telepresence sessions between international headquarters and watching YouTube video of sales presentations are common activities. It helps when you have corporate thought leaders such as Cisco CEO John Chambers evangelizing video by ensuring that it is widely adopted within his own organization.

Cisco’s use of telepresence is well known, but it explores other applications too: “On our campus, digital signs talk about what’s happening in the company to keep the employees engaged,” says Suraj Shetty, VP of service provider marketing at Cisco. IP-based video surveillance is also on the rise. New products offer artificial intelligence analysis of video feeds to alert companies to activities such as tailgating through secure areas, ensuring that the benefits of video extend all the way into areas such as corporate risk management.

But there are fears that businesses’ growing adoption of video may be stopped in the tracks by the boom in consumer video traffic, particularly for content originating on the Internet or applications that must traverse it. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index 2008, an annual report that tracks global IP traffic volumes, consumer internet video to PC traffic (which excludes IPTV) will rise from 269 petabytes per month in 2006 to 6216 petabytes a month in four years – around half of all Internet traffic. This is comparable to the total amount of business IP traffic (6677 petabytes per month).

Investment needed

The sheer scale of video growth means ISPs will need to make significant investments in their networks to ensure the Internet remains a working tool for business and consumers alike. Many are already doing so: backbone capacity is being improved, access bottlenecks freed up and obsolete equipment upgraded. Others are investing in content delivery network technology from firms like Akamai which help media companies cache their video content closer to their customers, reducing the strain on backbones.


But these measures alone will probably not be enough. Most will adopt some form of traffic compression and prioritization to ensure that video doesn't bring Internet traffic to a standstill. Some ISPs are already using packet shaping in their access networks to de-prioritize traffic they believe to be P2P. While this traffic is not blocked outright, it may be held back during peak times. The next step in packet shaping’s deployment may be on the public Internet and not just to throttle back unwanted content – some service providers want to be able to sell an premium internet service that guarantees the video traffic performs well.

Packet shaping technology is also useful in corporate networks. It ensures that video communications, which are sensitive to delay and packet loss are prioritized, and that capacity is choked back for streamed videos from sites like YouTube, even if they may occasionally be legitimate work activities. According to Gartner, enterprise spending on application acceleration equipment worldwide will grow by nearly 40% in 2008, to $3.3 billion, and reach $5.7 billion by the end of 2012. Multicasting is also being increasingly adopted by enterprises wishing to send out video across the organization. This technology ensures that simultaneous video streams to multiple recipients share as much infrastructure as possible rather than being sent out individually to each user.

Investment in WAN optimization is something within the enterprise’s own hands. However, businesses cannot ensure that the home workers or remote sites connecting to the WAN over a broadband internet connection will not suffer poor performance because the Internet is drowning with 2012’s version of Chocolate Rain. It remains to be seen whether the doomsayers are right and the Internet collapses under the sheer wait of video traffic or if ISPs can stand up to the task ahead.