A few days ago we announced new products that now support medianet media monitoring . Media monitoring helps you to assess and measure the impact of video, voice, and data applications in the network. It gives IT operators more confidence and peace of mind to deploy and manage different video and voice applications in their network by enhancing visibility into the network and accelerating troubleshooting.

One of the features of media monitoring is mediatrace which allows IT operators to troubleshoot an issue while it occurs. Mediatrace works like a traceroute that follows a specific flow hop-by-hop collecting performance statistics end-to-end. It can be started from an endpoint with Media Services Interface or in any router or switch that supports the capability.

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Tags: business video, enterprise networks, medianet, mediatrace, rich media applications, video

We are very pleased to announce a new medianet release  including new products that support the medianet features:

• Cisco Prime™ Assurance Manager which provides an end-to-end proactive, network based monitoring, troubleshooting & analysis of application traffic. It supports a variety of data sources including performance monitor.
• Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers  now provides support for performance monitor.
• Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switches, in their next release that is coming up soon, will support performance monitor,  mediatrace and IPSLA video operations.

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Tags: business video, enterprise networks, medianet, rich media applications, video

Ready or not, governments, healthcare providers, and schools are going mobile. If your workforce isn’t mobile yet, it soon will be: by 2013, 80 percent of businesses will support a mobile workforce (one that specifically relies on tablet technology), according to Gartner.

As I mentioned before, mobile employees will depend on telepresence and video collaboration tools to optimize their work experiences: these technologies do a wonderful job of filling the gap in personal interaction that can occur when an entire office works outside of the actual office.

But telepresence and video are only as good as the networks that support them.

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Tags: Gartner, medianet, mobile, mobile employees, Tablets, TelePresence

The month of January always seems to be a very busy time at gyms; everyone starts the New Year off with good intentions. Now that February is here I can definitely see the trail off of in attendance at the local gym. Have you resolved to deploy video this year, or maybe your users have resolved for you J ? You’ll need to ensure your network is fit for the job. It won’t be difficult at all. There are features to make it easy to stay on track.

The first  of those features is AutoQos.

The concept of Auto Qos is that the hard work of defining a QOS strategy and implementing it on the network is already done for you. Two main things compromise that strategy, what are the DSCP settings that should be used and how to interpret those setting into a configuration that implements classification, policing and queuing mechanisms within the network.

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Tags: AutoQoS, business video, enterprise networks, medianet, rich media applications, video

If I had to summarize Cisco Live London in one word, I choose “educational”. In the four days I was at Cisco Live London, I had the opportunity to meet our local medianet experts, Patrick Charretour and Peter Matthews, learn about our broad core network portfolio, and listen to the challenges our customers face as they use video solutions in their organization.  Whether customers are deploying video surveillance, signage, or telepresence, each seemed to want help on where to start with their deployment and wondering if medianet would be the solution.

Conversations at the medianet station were engaging and all seem to start with the same question, “What is medianet?”.  Medianet is Cisco’s end-to-end video architecture, optimize for the pervasive deployment of video. So at Cisco Live, we demonstrated how Cisco’s medianet architecture makes it easier for you to plan, deploy and manage video in your organization.  Using Cisco TelePresence EX 90 systems, we demonstrated the performance monitoring and mediatrace capabilities in a Cisco medianet, allowing application and network managers to easily identify and troubleshoot issues that may occur during a telepresence call.  We also showed a new capability, but since we haven’t officially launched it, I can’t say much.  You’ll just have to go to Interop Las Vegas or Cisco Live San Diego to find out.

Peter showing a mediatrace of the TelePresence session

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Tags: capture, enterprise video, keynote, medianet, pulse, Share, transform, video