Cisco Revs Its Video Engine
DECEMBER 08, 2008
lightreading.com
The video makeover at Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO - message board) isn't just about consumer TV and Scientific Atlanta devices. The company thinks video is about to make a deep impact on corporate networks, too, and it's targeting those applications with what it says is a new type of video-centric network appliance.
The new Media Experience Engine (MXE) 3000 -- already deployed by at least one customer -- is being launched today and will be a central point of discussion at C-Scape, Cisco's annual analyst conference, which starts Tuesday. (See Cisco's Video Transformation .)
Cisco is trumpeting the MXE 3000 as a new type of appliance, something without an equivalent in IP networks. It's very much aimed at the enterprise, and ultimately it's going to tie together Cisco products including TelePresence and digital signage, says Guido Jourdet, CTO for Cisco's emerging technologies efforts.
This isn't about people ordering movies on demand at work. Cisco is eyeing the possibilities of enterprise-generated video, a category the company thinks will skyrocket in coming years. And Cisco executives point to their own network as proof.
"When Cisco upgraded the networks and put the TelePresence systems in, our bandwidth shot up by 6X," says Murali Nemani, Cisco director of marketing for service provider video. "Today, 50 percent of our traffic is video. We had to not just add more bandwidth, but we had to change the capabilities in the switches and routers so they could scale."
(Note -- Cisco, with 307 TelePresence sites, could be considered an extreme case among enterprise users.)
Specifications on the MXE 3000 weren't available at press time, and Cisco didn't furnish pictures of the device. Much of the box's magic depends on its software, which, Cisco admits, was developed outside the company and is being offered on an OEM basis.
But Jourdet freely discussed the box's current and future capabilities, sketching an ambitious video-centric future for the product line.
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Any-to-any
First off, the MXE can do simple post-production work, such as adding watermarks or captions to videos. It's also capable of transcoding, the translating of video into different formats -- particularly those used by mobile phones.
"The problem we're solving is that to some extent, with all of these video systems, you have an any-to-any problem," Jouret says.
Those kinds of functions puts Cisco in competition with a swath of video-gear companies, from transcoding experts such as Harmonic Inc. (Nasdaq: HLIT - message board) and Scopus Video Networks (Nasdaq: SCOP - message board) to security specialists such as Verimatrix Inc. and Widevine Technologies Inc. .
But with Cisco targeting the MXE at enterprises (at least initially), it's not certain how deep this competition will run.
"What Cisco's doing is more oriented towards, I would say, casual-use cases," says one would-be competitor who requested anonymity. "One of their biggest things is stuff like videoconferencing. You're an enterprise and you now want to put up training videos for your internal applications, so rather than having internal expertise about formats, you just stick a video here and it ends up there."
That approach isn't likely to work on the consumer side, "because there are strict requirements when dealing with cable systems or even Internet-video sites like Hulu LLC ," the source says.
Sticking to that enterprise world, though, there are some interesting capabilities on the way for the MXE. An obvious example is the ability to do that transcoding in real-time, something that Jouret says will be coming later in 2009.
Usual suspects
And you knew there had to be some point where the routers came in, right? Jouret says the MXE 3000's capabilities will eventually get added to switches and routers.
"What we're going to be able to do, because this media processing capability will be in the routers and in the switches, is adapt the video stream continually," he says.
Ideally, that means that when the network gets congested, it can instruct the media server to make adjustments -- maybe lower the frame rate, or send fewer bits per pixel. That means the image will get more coarse, but it could prevent pixellation or occasional screen blackouts.
TelePresence gets a role here, too, again because Cisco can't do anything these days without mentioning that technology. (See Chambers On-Air.)
Jouret envisions live TelePresence sessions being broadcast out to the enterprise, with the MXE 3000 or similar device building the video streams in multiple formats in real time.
In fact, Jouret says Cisco is on its way to turning enterprises' expensive TelePresence rooms into outright high-definition video studios. In a few months, he says, TelePresence recording will be possible. Combine that with a transcript entered as metadata -- which could be inserted via the MXE 3000 -- and you've got a text-searchable video.
Jouret relishes the fact that the MXE is nothing like the gear Cisco has been selling, not even out of Scientific Atlanta. It's just another sign that Cisco doesn't think routers alone can power its future.
"The face of Cisco is changing, and in some way, it's not the worst thing that some of the old executives left, because they need a new set of skills now," says Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with Yankee Group Research Inc. (See Changes Run Deep at Cisco, Ullal Calls It Quits at Cisco and Giancarlo Quits Cisco, Paddles to Silver Lake.)
— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading |
