Cisco’s Medianet gains meat

Cisco this week broadened its Medianet business video strategy with new products designed to make video pervasively deployable throughout an enterprise, regardless of the make and manufacturer of the gear. Colleague Tim Greene has the full story here.

The new products add meat to Cisco’s Medianet strategy, which up to now had been mostly a reference architecture or blueprint, Greene reports. And now that it has products to fill out the vision, Cisco has changed the name of the strategy to Medianet 2.0.

The catch, though, is that the video equipment be connected to a Cisco network and controlled through a Cisco Media Experience Engine (MXE) – essentially the guts of a Cisco Medianet. MXE is a processing platform that sits between an enterprise switch and router and is designed to simplify media sharing across the network by optimizing its delivery in any format for any device.  It provides media conversion, real-time post production, editing, formatting, and network distribution.

As such, MXE serves as the “ferry boat” between islands of disparate video networks and equipment, Greene reports. The initial MXE is two years old but Cisco this week unveiled a larger, modular MXE for Medianet 2.0.

Medinet 2.0-compatible endpoints include laptops, video phones, and business- and consumer-class telepresence systems, like Cisco’s recently introduced umi. Video gear from Logitech Lifesize and Polycom can also play in Medianet 2.0, Greene reports.

The architecture is also designed to integrate unified communications and collaboration networks, WebEx, digital signs and physical security devices, according to Cisco.

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