It seems like Mobile World Congress in Barcelona continues to grow year over year, suggesting the appetite for mobile services and devices will continue to explode over the coming years. The range of exhibitors is overwhelming covering a range of technology products and services. In addition to the usual suspects of handset manufacturers, mobile app vendors, and mobile network platform vendors, I noticed a strong undercurrent of enterprise/business-class service offerings, as if mobile services are starting to break away from the consumer-centric roots of the industry and driving towards the business of delivering services that enterprises would care about. Mobile device management vendors were certainly at the forefront of this trend with the range of device management options growing exponentially it would seem.

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Tags: business video, medianet, mobile world congress, mobility, rich media, video

There has been a lot of good progress after the Plugfest launch for Media Services Proxy (MSP) at the ASIS (for IP Surveillance) in September 2012. The Plugfest was very well received by many IP Surveillance camera vendors, and the feedback has been very positive on why and how MSP is very useful for IP surveillance deployments. We have continued to engage with quite a few partners we met at the Plugfest to make sure we build on this partnership.

I am delighted to announce that the following partners have successfully completed the Interoperability Verification Testing (IVT) as part of the MSP CDN program:

• Flir Systems (Model: F-316)
• Hikvision (Model: ds-2cd754)
• Panasonic (Model: wv-sp509)
• Schneider Electric – Pelco Cameras by Schneider Electric (Model: IXE10LW)

These are our first set of partners to have been validated against Cisco Medianet’s MSP capabilities, which makes deployment and operations of these IP surveillance cameras simpler and effective on a Cisco network. We are working with the other partners and hope to provide updates very soon!

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Tags: business video, Cisco Developer Network, enterprise networks, Flir, Hikvision, IVT, media services proxy, medianet, msp, Panasonic, Schneider Electric, video

Networks and applications have become increasingly complex as new rich media applications and networking technologies have been adopted. In some cases, this layer of complexity has led to stalled deployments and a loss of confidence in the network by both the network and application operators. Today, organizations rely so heavily on their networked infrastructure, it is imperative to move beyond reactive management techniques of old and assume a more proactive approach by instituting scalable performance management.

Medianet introduces Performance Monitor and Mediatrace embedded in the network and the endpoints/applications, a collection of capabilities that will address these challenges. The frequently asked question is how to get started. Here is one way to get started.

Cisco Prime Collaboration allows you to monitor video collaboration systems. You can run a worst endpoint/session report to identify sites based on the lower performing end systems.

Useful Prime Collaboration reports include:

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Tags: business video, media monitoring, medianet, performance monitor, Prime Collaboration, video

We are excited to announce that ActionPacked! Networks successfully completed interoperability verification and testing of LiveAction for the MSI management CDN program. This makes them the first management partner to support the MSI’s REST-based management interface (v3.1). This support gives LiveAction the ability to monitor and troubleshoot issues on any MSI enabled endpoint. LiveAction supports both certificate-based and username/password based authentication to MSI-enabled endpoints.

LiveAction is also a Medianet Systems Management CDN partner supporting Medianet capabilities on the network elements. With their current enhancements to support the MSI management interface, LiveAction becomes one of the first products to support Medianet capabilities on endpoints as well as the network.

This successful IVT also underlines the fact that Medianet is based on open standards and was designed from the start to be an open, interoperable architecture.

A few additional highlights on LiveAction:

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Tags: ActionPacked, business video, Cisco Developer Network, enterprise networks, IVT, media services interface, medianet, MSI, video

A belated Happy New Year from Cisco Live London 2013! This is our last year in London, and it was an excellent sendoff bringing the latest for medianet to our great partners and customers in the European market. With the greater adoption of medianet technologies, we saw the incorporation of medianet features within the general design sessions related to Jabber deployment, to Access Switching, WAN Network Designs [1] and even a few Management [2][3] sessions. (Some of the session links provide a video capture of the session as well as a download of the content)

Meanwhile, the event brought an introduction to Medianet Flow Metadata [4] as well as Media Services Proxy [5], which allows the sharing of attributes of flows with the network. The network can then use these attributes for advanced classification, for example, to match the audio leg of a Jabber for Windows session. We had a demo station setup where we showed the quality of metadata-based classification of Jabber video compared to other forms of video that did not benefit from advanced classification. Of course, there were a number of other demo stations showing the network management utilization of medianet features for monitoring and reporting on network performance, namely Performance Monitor [6] and Mediatrace [7].

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Tags: Cisco Live London, collaboration, medianet, rich media applications, video