It’s a Video world and we all just live in it

Before the holidays I had an opportunity to meet about 50 senior IT/Networking executives and I asked them about some of their long term network architecture challenges.  To my surprise, Video was top of mind for nearly all of them.
It’s not because they necessarily have huge amounts of video today... on average 7% of their total network traffic is video and the highest user was a bit over 20% (by comparison, Cisco’s internal network is about 60% video).  It’s the growth of video that has their attention.
On average this group is seeing 50% growth in video usage per year.  And they can look at the explosive growth of video usage on the Internet and extrapolate the ramifications for their enterprise.  So this group is very focused on how to optimize video experiences across their network.

Some people might be tempted to consider stifling the growth of video or even blocking video traffic as a different way to deal with the growth in video usage but consider this:
The key business benefit of the web 1.0 era was automation (e.g. web self service) which enabled companies to achieve dramatic productivity gains by eliminating people from key business processes in favor of web transactions.  The data entry clerks, paper forms and cumbersome processes of the past gave way to automated transactions that improved worker productivity.  But most of the low hanging fruit has been picked and we’re rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns on web automation.
So that leaves us with business processes where humans cannot be automated out – where human interaction is a critical component of the process, e.g. contract negotiations, job interviews, strategy planning etc.  Video plays a unique role in scaling human interactions.  Now I can use video technologies like TelePresence to be in 5 cities around the globe in 1 day conducting face to face meetings.  I can record and broadcast key messages to staff, co-workers and customers anywhere without sacrificing the impact and effectiveness of the communication.  Stifling video is paramount to giving up on improving worker productivity.
As we ring in the new year, think about how to harness video technologies to enable new capabilities in your business and prepare for a time when video will be 50%, 70% or even 90% of your network traffic because…
It’s a video world, and we just all live in it.

Posted by David Hsieh at 07:32AM PST