One of the key objectives of Medianet is to integrate a smarter network with various media endpoints in order to simplify end-to-end deployments and operations and to enhance quality of experience for the end user. We are very happy to announce Plugfest as a strategic step forward towards meeting this objective. Plugfest is an Interoperability Verification Testing (IVT) event to be hosted at the ASIS show (booth 213) in Philadelphia, September 10- 12, 2012. Plugfest at the ASIS will be focused on verifying IP Surveillance Cameras within a Cisco network.

We are very pleased to announce Plugfest for you. Plugfest launches the Media Services Proxy (MSP) capability as part of Cisco Medianet solutions. This would be a very good opportunity for you to get your cameras verified with the Cisco’s Medianet-enabled network by just plugging your camera in. There is no additional development or change required on the end points provided there is compliance to standard based protocols like RTSP, SDP and mDNS, which MSP is based on. On successful verification, your organization along with qualified camera models and the capabilities they have been tested against would be listed on the CDN (Cisco Developer Network) partner page. You would also get the Cisco CDN “Compatible” logo that can be shared externally! You can find all details on Plugfest on the CDN MSP portal. Read More »

Tags: asis, business video, cdn, enterprise networks, medianet, msp, plugfest, rich media applications, video

In a recent Forbes article Guido Jouret, Cisco’s Emerging Technologies CTO, talks about how in today’s business world all companies require video strategies to achieve successful collaboration. I couldn’t agree more.  I recognize however that implementation of video technology like telepresence raises concerns about network capacity. While high-quality, secure video enables more face-to-face interactions and helps build deeper relationships, an insufficient video implementation can ruin the user experience and counter potential productivity gains.

So how will your network support video collaboration?  The short answer:  With the right enterprise-level solution for video implementation, your network will operate seamlessly and video connections will be as personal as in-room meetings.

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Tags: Cisco, collaboration, Forbes, medianet, TelePresence, video

A few weeks ago, Soneco successfully completed their interoperability verification and testing (IVT) with medianet  for its product ICmyNet.Media through the medianet systems management Cisco Developer Network  (CDN) program.

By working very closely with the medianet team through CDN, the ICmyNet.Media team added support to performance monitor enabling our customers to gain visibility into the network, to learn more about the performance of their media flows and to perform faster troubleshooting.

ICmyNet.Media is web based network monitoring tool that leverages medianet performance monitor and gives you valuable insight in your network media flows. It allows you to: Read More »

Tags: business video, enterprise networks, ICMyNet, media monitoring, medianet, performance monitor, rich media applications, TelePresence, video

Cisco IPSLA has been a very popular tool for network pre-deployment assessment and network monitoring for over a decade now. It has been widely deployed by Cisco customers across all industry verticals.

In an earlier blog, the Medianet team introduced you to a new type of IPSLA probe called the Video Operation (VO) probe. This probe is also referred to as the Built-In Traffic Simulator (BITS). The main functionality of this probe is to generate traffic that mimics real media flows. The intention is to stress the network and do a pre-deployment assessment of the network.

IPSLA VO is a Cisco IOS® functionality. So basically any router or switch running Cisco IOS® can be potentially used to generate IPSLA VO synthetic traffic streams without needing to buy and deploy dedicated hardware probes.

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Tags: BITS, Custom profile generation, IPSLA VO, medianet

In the first part of this blog, I discussed some of the challenges faced by network administrators and how the Cisco Jabber team has integrated their client with the Cisco Media Services Interface (MSI) to enable Cisco to provide an end to end solution to these problems. In this part of the blog, I discuss the impact and benefits of the Cisco Jabber and WebEx integrations into the Medianet architecture (especially for network devices that support Media Awareness), features such as MS Proxy, and the overall benefits to desktop clients.

So what does this mean for network devices that do support media awareness? The first impact is around performance management. Network devices are able to add this information to Netflow/IPFix records. Increasingly, network administrators are using Netflow/IPFix as the primary source of data to enable performance management. Netflow provides records of every flow that passes through the device and records the amount of packets sent, bandwidth consumed etc. Recently the ability to monitor the performance of these flows has been added to Netflow so now an administrator is able to match flows to performance data to determine whether the network is able to deliver the service these applications need. By adding metadata to these records the administrator can now distinguish between the various applications and media types, opening up the prospect for detailed reporting on performance and capacity down to a level of granularity that has never been possible in the past.

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Tags: desktop video, jabber, Media Awareness, medianet, Metadata, MSI, video soft client, WebEX