Video growth means greater network utilization, new markets for Cisco to play in, and more sales of its core routers and switches.
SAN JOSE — Cisco CEO John Chambers wants to make it clear that his company’s top executives and technologists all have their eyes sharply focused on video screens — from 50-inch plasmas, to cell phone and desktop PC monitors.
Speaking to industry analysts at Cisco’s C-Scape conference here, Chambers continued to push video as the application that will drive Cisco’s growth, as well as a technology that will lift up the vendor’s traditional router and switch – or, as Chambers says “plumbing” — business.
C-Scape, a revamped version of Cisco’s annual World Wide Analyst Conference, runs from Tuesday, Dec. 12 to 13. At the event, Chambers said he expects to see an explosion of video usage in all areas of networking, such as high-definition telepresence and corporate video messaging in enterprises, as well as IPTV in carrier networks. Cisco also plans to capitalize on expansion of burgeoning video-on-demand and movie downloading services, as well as low-quality, but high-volume, video streaming on personal networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace.
“If there is a killer application, it is video,” Chambers said. “Just watch what has occurred with YouTube,” where more than 40 million videos, at over 200TB, are streamed per day, according to estimates. “I would consider that baby-steps in terms of [potential future] loads on networks.”
Cisco says it will capitalize on the video push with its traditional routers and switches, as well as new products, such as gear that allows a business to encode high-quality video from a desktop, and manage the distribution of content across a company. Meanwhile, Cisco will pursue video growth in the consumer, home network and entertainment markets through its Scientific Atlanta and Linksys brands.
The effect video is having on carriers is reflected in their purchase orders from Cisco, Chambers claims, as purchase of CRS-1 routers — Cisco’s highest-end product — by service providers “are going from is going from three to five to 10 to 15 to 30 and sometimes 40” CRS-1s in a network in anticipation of growth. (Sales of the terabit-scale router have grown 600% year-over-year since its introduction in 2004, he added.)
Chambers and Cisco “Chief Demonstration Officer” Jim Grubb also showed off new enterprise video products that will be announced in January, which let enterprises control video, multimedia and digital signage content on kiosks, large-screen displays, and network-attached billboard devices.
The Cisco Media Player is a small, set-top-box-sized network device, which can stream video, still images or text to any type of display — such as a plasma or LCD flat panel, or kiosk screen. The box is managed by software called Digital Media Manager, which allows administrators to group the Media Players, control what content is pushed to the devices, and when.
Another key for Cisco is data center virtualization, Chambers said. Moving services and processes off of servers and into a network equipment — such as middleware and application messaging layers — is an area Cisco has pushed with its Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) concept. Chambers said virtualizing storage, applications, processing and access methods will affect the enterprise as well as carrier and entertainment and media service provider data centers.
On the enterprise side, end users should expect to receive corporate data securely, on any type of device or network, without knowing where the data is stored or how it is processed in the data center, Chambers said. As for a consumer/service provider angle, “I do not want to store my Desperate Housewives and Duke basketball games on four TiVos or DVRs throughout my house; I want to be able to have that managed somehow,” Chambers added. Providers hosting content from virtualized centers will be able to do this more easily, he said.
Industry analysts who attended Chambers’ presentation said Cisco’s grand ambitions for video and data center overhauls could take many years to realize.
“A lot of this stuff has adoption problems,” said Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects. Cisco’s Telepresence products, for instance, cost as much as $250,000 to set up a single room — a price tag which may cause many businesses to balk at the technology. Acceptance of video as a communications and messaging tool may also be too much to swallow as many CIOs and network administrators are just now dealing with voice convergence.
“It took 10 years to get where we are with VoIP, and VoIP is not ubiquitous yet,” Dzubeck said.
IP video proliferation in corporate and carrier networks will also affect IT in more ways than increased network loads, said Jean Bozman, a research vice president with IDC.
“It’s nice to have video, but where do you store it?” she said. “What [growth in] video represents to enterprise is the workload. It’s a work on everything.” Increased processing power, and the prioritization of video with critical data center-hosted applications are other issues to consider, she added.
“A lot of the messages here was the same as last year,” said Dzubeck. Video, and the loads they put on networks, was a theme at last year’s analyst conference, he said, while the concept of SONA and data center was also launched a year ago.
