Video traffic is impossible to ignore. YouTube alone serves 100 million videos per day, and more than 65,000 videos are uploaded daily.

At the same time, use of video materials in corporate settings is on the rise. Companies that are distributed geographically see video materials -- both live streaming video and on-demand content -- as a means to engage far-flung staff working in satellite locations, home offices and on the road. Roughly 80% of enterprises will use video or rich media as part of their overall training and corporate communications plans by 2008, research firm Gartner predicts.

As companies look for ways to make use of video for legitimate business purposes, network managers have to ensure that corporate video initiatives receive the necessary infrastructure support. Among the challenges are how to minimize the effect of video on the network and implement policies to control which video streams receive WAN bandwidth. Clearly, an employee watching a training video is more deserving of corporate bandwidth than one watching a clip of some stunt captured on video and spread virally among curious Internet viewers.

One vendor with plans to help tame the video onslaught is Blue Coat Systems, which this week is expected to unveil a strategy for integrating its application delivery products with enterprise video systems.

Blue Coat has developed a software interface to link its WAN optimization technologies with video produced using systems from partnering vendors such as Media Publisher and Jubilant Technologies. In this way, employees in charge of producing and disseminating business videos can publish and revoke content with a single click -- and without having to involve the IT staff responsible for monitoring and managing bandwidth consumption. Video publishers can manage video content, and infrastructure managers can focus on application delivery, says Chris King, director of strategic marketing at Blue Coat.

“We’ve developed an interface between our product and those types of products that enables the person who’s doing the video training or corporate communications bit to do a single-click publish out to our network, which then takes that video and distributes it to all the remote Blue Coat appliances,” he says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.