In a previous blog, I discussed the value of media awareness with desktop video applications like Jabber for Windows. More recently, we have extended support to the WebEx meeting center client using the same media services interface (MSI) development kit as used with the Cisco Jabber client. Just as media awareness enables the network to differentiate between the various unified communications flows—voice, video and IM/Presence—with the WebEx meeting client we have added metadata tags to represent the data sharing flows that are used as part of WebEx web collaboration.

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

Part 2 of a 4-part series

In part one of this series, Cisco Video Collaboration Group SVP Marthin De Beer kicked off our exploration of the new Cisco Video strategy unveiled at Cisco Live 2012 in San Diego.

Video drives more traffic than any other application on the network and it’s changing how people communicate, collaborate, and consume content and entertainment. By 2016, we forecast 86% of traffic on networks will be video.

Using video is about the optimal experience for the task at hand – it is about creating that in-person experience from immersive TelePresence, but also about creating the best possible experience when you are on the road participating via your iPad.

When it comes to video, Cisco does three things differently to ensure superior end-to-end video experiences with greater efficiencies:

• Architectural Approach: The Cisco Medianet architecture delivers superior experiences and efficiencies by integrating video capabilities all the way from the network to the application. Cisco video endpoints use Medianet to discover and configure themselves, dramatically reducing deployment cost. Medianet infrastructure provides detailed performance information, which allows IT organizations to detect and fix problems in a fraction of the time required by traditional approaches. Medianet also helps companies leverage existing investments to build new capabilities more cost efficiently, such as adding recording and sharing to TelePresence or providing common call control for voice and video endpoints. Cisco’s advantage comes from the network, which allows us to build and manage systems that best “understand” network performance, complexity, interactivity, and capacity.  While Medianet provides compelling experience and total cost of ownership advantages today, we believe an architectural approach like Medianet will become absolutely required as video becomes pervasive.

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Tags: Cisco Networked Video Strategy, enterprise video, medianet, NDS, service provider video, TelePresence, video, video architecture, video collaboration, video intelligence, video surveillance, videoscape

A recent industry announcement affirms how important video communication is to the future of business-to-business collaboration.  As the global market share leader in telepresence and video collaboration solutions, we have always been firm believers that video calling should be as easy and ubiquitous as making phone calls.  We are highly encouraged by innovations that seek to spur user scale while simultaneously reducing costs and enabling new customers to experience the transformative power that only this technology can deliver.

In order to deliver on this vision and to extend the power of video collaboration to more people, Cisco has embarked on a multi-pronged strategy that is already producing results for end users.

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Tags: collaboration, collaboration summit, open standards, reduce costs, seamless integration, standards-based, TelePresence, video, video conferencing

I’m pleased to announce that Cisco has received a Strong Positive rating in Gartner’s 2012 MarketScope for Telepresence and Group Video Systems.  We believe Gartner’s MarketScope Report confirms a shift we see taking place across the video market – while customers are still investing in multiscreen deployments, they are also looking for other options in order to drive pervasive adoption across their organization.  These options can come in many flavors – less expensive room-based solutions, personal / PC-based options and one of the biggest trends – video being available on mobile devices.

Customer expectations for quality and reach remain high which does make it difficult for some players to address all segments while providing a seamless experience across all solutions.  We strongly agree with Gartner’s view that enterprise customers do desire dedicated room-based systems to anchor their video experience and because of this, we have continued to invest in this area of the portfolio.  We recently launched the Cisco TelePresence TX9000 Series which not only delivers the highest quality in-person immersive experience, but also features more advanced collaboration capabilities along with the ability to easily integrate users from multiple devices and applications into a telepresence experience.  This flexibility enables our customers to drive a pervasive strategy and quickly deploy video and telepresence to a broader number of users in their organization while also maintaining the highest quality experience for business critical sessions. Read More »

Tags: analyst report, Cisco, Gartner, market rating, MarketScope, Snorre Kjesbu, TelePresence, TX9000, video

Cisco’s Remote Expert brings face-to-face interactions back to the forefront of your business, improving productivity and reinvigorating customer interfaces with a personal touch that’s unachievable with telephone, email, text, chat and other online interactions. We know that “in person” communication strengthens business relationships and generates meaningful customer touchpoints, but what other benefits can Remote Expert provide to your organization?

Well, for starters, consider these:

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Tags: Cisco, improve customer relations, improve productivity, reduce travel, remote expert, ROI