Cisco Blog > Borderless Networks
April 25, 2011 at 9:12 am PST
Finally it’s here. Cisco has been working on integrating the Media Services Interface (MSI) into the WebEx Meeting Client.
For those unfamiliar with the MSI, it’s an SDK developed to enable applications to interact with a Cisco Medianet. One of the long standing challenges IT organizations have faced has been to harmonize the needs of applications and endpoints with the network services required to meet those needs. It’s been a case of ships in the night as network administrators have done their best to deliver services while having limited interaction with the endpoints and applications that leverage those services. Asking endpoints and applications to consistently implement all the networking protocols to enable them to leverage the network has often led to mixed results; inconsistent or incomplete protocol stack implementations led to interoperability issues with the burden usually falling on the end customer.
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Tags: business video, enterprise networks, media services interface, medianet, MSI, rich media applications, video, WebEX
Yesterday on Talk2Cisco, Guido Jouret, Cisco’s VP/GM of the Enterprise Video Group and CTO of the Emerging Technologies Group, joined the Cisco community to describe what the big buzz around video in the enterprise is all about.
During the half-hour session, Guido took several questions from the audience around specific applications for video in the enterprise, including common use cases such as for advertising and safety and security operations.
You can watch a replay of yesterday’s interactive event here.
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Tags: Cisco, medianet, video
The announcement earlier this week focused on the Borderless Networks services with new capabilities for Centralized Policy, Unified Management and Automated Video and Voice. For more information on the announcement, see Marie Hattar’s blog.
Automated Video and Voice highlights the unique capabilities in the network infrastructure to simplify the deployment and optimize the network for video.
Why video?
Because it is not a question of IF it is coming to Enterprise networks, but WHEN. As you can see from the chart from Forrester Research (Jan. 2011) the adoption for video applications and technologies is on the significant growth path because they are adding value for businesses.
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Tags: Cisco Borderless Networks, IPSLA video, medianet, mediatrace, performance monitoring, video
April 19, 2011 at 5:10 am PST
This week, a New York Times article focused on retailers and their efforts (or lack thereof) to develop mobile sites and apps to enable anytime-anywhere shopping. One statistic that caught my eye in the article: 85 percent of consumers expect to be able to shop using their smartphones and expect that experience to be at least as good as shopping on a computer. Yet, the article reports that: “By mid-2010, according to the Acquity Group, just 12 percent of the top 500 United States online retailers had sites compatible with mobile browsers, while just 7 percent had apps.”
Whether you’re an IT professional, a business decision maker, an employee, a consumer or customer, the topics of mobile productivity and the connected experience matter, regardless of which side of the fence you’re on.
And that’s why I’m excited to announce our latest launch. As headlines continue to tout the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, businesses need to ensure that they can allow secure access for anyone on any device and deliver rich applications (like video and voice) reliably—all while providing seamless integration across all elements.
In addition, when you factor in emerging cloud trends, the ability to deliver voice and video applications over any device becomes even more critical—not to mention complex from a management standpoint.
Today we’re adding more powerful capabilities to the Borderless Network Architecture to help IT administrators ensure success. Three new major solutions for Borderless Networks help make the network architecture work seamlessly, reliably, and securely to address growing trends and expectations.
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Tags: Borderless Networks, medianet, network management, policy, video, Voice
Last week, we introduced the new IP SLA Video Operation tool to assess the readiness of a network by generating synthetic traffic to mimic real applications. When you use IP SLA VO to generate simulated RTP traffic between two sites, you can use the medianet Performance Monitor feature to measure the performance of this synthetic traffic across the network. You can also use Mediatrace to discover the network elements on the paths between the two sites. For each network element discovered in the network path, Performance Monitor can collect metrics to detect potential capacity bottlenecks and proactively identify quality issues.
In addition to the obvious use for pre-deployment assessment, many enterprises understand that the network and applications are constantly changing so it is necessary to do continuous assessments. For example, after a major scheduled network maintenance or upgrade during non-business hours, you can use IP SLA VO to simulate real application traffic and assess the impact of the network changes to minimize potential business disruption or even downtime. Another example is prior to an important event, you can use IP SLA VO to stress test the network and verify that it can handle the rich media traffic without impacting existing application performance.
Whether you are doing an initial assessment for a new deployment, an expansion to an existing deployment, or ongoing operations, IPSLA VO, Performance Monitor and Mediatrace are effective tools to identify and proactively resolve rich media problems across the network. Put this handy tool in your toolbox and you will like it.
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Tags: business video, enterprise networks, IPSLA Video Operation, medianet, rich media applications, video
