How Dominant Will Video Become?How Dominant Will Video Become?

It'll be 90% of Internet traffic, Cisco predicts. What does that mean for the enterprise?

The big event of the week that's not Apple's Hype-athon Tabletganza is Cisco's Networkers, and there's some pretty bold predictions coming out of the Cisco event in Barcelona, most notably relating to video.As reported on the Cisco internal blog here, Marthin DeBeer, who spearheads Cisco's video initiatives, told the crowd that by 2013, 90% of Internet traffic will be video.

I can't quite tell if it's Marthin or the Cisco blogger who's predicting the "end of the word" (though I like the phrase) because of video's coming ascendancy, and there's certainly some hyperbole there. There also appear to be concrete actions that Cisco is taking to make video more accessible--an interoperability protocol for TelePresence, monitoring and tagging capabilities, lots of pretty cool ideas.

It's important to remember that video can represent 90% of the packets running across the Internet without representing anything close to 90% of the interactions being carried. We're not looking at the death of written or audio-only communications, though it hardly matters to Cisco. Bits are bits, and you need Cisco routers and switches to move them, and that's the really big win for Cisco as video grows.

And video's going to grow, which is why it's becoming an integral part of VoiceCon; again this year, we're running a special track devoted to enterprise video, with a focus on what it'll take to get video more broadly deployed. Part of this will deal with network impacts, but a heavy emphsis will be on the video technology itself--codecs, interoperability, deployment models and such.

The track is being spearheaded by Andrew Davis and Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research, together with John Bartlett of NetForecast. These guys are the experts on video systems and deployment. We're also working with Scott Wharton, who was one of the founders of Broadsoft and who now has a startup in the video space, Vidtel, which is trying to more effectively link videoconferencing "islands."

Particularly with the release of the new Apple tablet, whatever it is (it's still an hour or 2 out as of this writing), video is finding its way into more people's personal computing/communications devices. Video will almost certainly be one of the roster of technologies that people adopt and use more fully in their personal/consumer lives long before they're handed it as an enterprise-supported application. That means ad hoc video will probably grow as an enterprise-used--if not enterprise-supported--application. That's another issue we'll have to confront in the months and years ahead.

Keep watching VoiceCon and No Jitter to follow the progress of video in the enterprise.It'll be 90% of Internet traffic, Cisco predicts. What does that mean for the enterprise?