Cisco Introduces Integrated Strategy to Make It Easier for Customers to Capture, Transform, and Share Video Content Across the Enterprise

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Sep 29, 2011) - Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced an innovative strategy and new product developments across its entire enterprise video portfolio to allow customers to unlock the power of video throughout their organizations. As enterprise video usage skyrockets, customers are struggling to stitch together fragmented video solutions to maximize employee productivity and speed their business operations. Cisco is addressing this emerging enterprise video content market, by helping solve these problems with new video content solutions and capabilities that enable customers to capture, enhance and analyze video, making it easier to find and accessible on any device at any time.

This announcement comes at a time when late-breaking research shows video is being used more not only in the enterprise, but also in a variety of ways. For example, more than 70 percent of corporate executives expect their use of one-way and two-way video to grow over the next two years. Currently, 34 percent of business executives record business videos on a daily basis, and 62 percent of business executives watch employee-created videos at least once a week.ⁱ

With today's announcement, Cisco is defining a new approach to enterprise video content that helps customers improve every phase of the end-to-end video creation and consumption process including:

• Simplifying how organizations capture video from any telepresence or videoconferencing endpoint to record or stream across the network
• Enabling end users to automatically transform video: adapt video so it can be delivered and viewed on any device or application, and analyze video such that users can easily find and navigate relevant video content
• Broadening the ability to share video across more devices, particularly mobile devices
• Accelerating live and on-demand video delivery across the enterprise to branch offices and remote users

This evolution of enterprise video content, integrated with existing video communications solutions, makes it easier for organizations to extend access to expertise and training, increasing employee productivity and creating a distinct competitive advantage. For network administrators, these developments help reduce the IT support needed as video expands throughout an organization, by simplifying video deployment and management. The Cisco medianet architecture is the key to lessening this burden on IT. Medianet includes a set of intelligent video endpoints, media services and network infrastructure that allows enterprises to easily scale video services, such as video recording or streaming, and create networks that are video-ready.

ANNOUNCEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

• Capture: Cisco is simplifying how any user can capture video on any video endpoint
  • Cisco is easing the process for capturing video by introducing seamless integration between the Cisco TelePresence® Content Server, the Cisco MXE 3500 Series (Media Experience Engines), and Cisco Show and Share®.
  • Through this integration, customers can record an HD video from any standards-based video conferencing or telepresence endpoint, and then automatically post that recording to Cisco Show and Share, where it becomes part of a highly secure, centralized video-sharing community. The information shared during the meeting becomes a lasting asset that can scale to reach absent meeting attendees or used as a training tool for the entire company.
  • In addition, now users can stream a videoconference or telepresence meeting directly into Show and Share®, thereby expanding the audience for any meeting and increasing employee engagement.
  • These new features are scheduled to be globally available in upcoming product releases.
• Transform: Cisco is making it easy for users to adapt and add intelligence to any type of video content
  • Upcoming functionality for the MXE 3500 expands the types of video that users can adapt and includes support for playing Cisco WebEx® recordings.
  • Cisco's MXE 3500 will support other popular video formats, including Flash, H.264 and Windows Media. With this broad format support, live streaming and on-demand enterprise video content becomes readily accessible and shareable through a central video portal such as Cisco Show and Share.
  • The new functionality of the MXE 3500 is targeted to be available globally within the next few months.
• Transform: As employee-created video becomes more popular in the enterprise, Cisco is introducing new ways to enable users to browse and navigate video effortlessly
  • Cisco is planning to integrate Cisco's Pulse Video Analytics, housed on the MXE 3500, into Cisco Show and Share, enabling users to quickly and easily locate desired video content in the Show and Share portal, including recorded video and WebEx® meetings.
  • Using the previously announced speaker and speech recognition capabilities, Pulse Video Analytics automatically filters video content by speaker or keyword.
  • The integration of Pulse Video Analytics is targeted to be available later this year.
• Share: Cisco is expanding highly secure enterprise video sharing to iPad and iPhone for mobile users
  • Cisco Show and Share, the video-sharing platform for the enterprise, is now available as an app for iPad and iPhone. The free app, scheduled to be available in late October on the App Store, allows mobile users to search and watch videos, as well as record and upload their own videos. The Show and Share app will support English, French, Spanish and German languages at launch.
• Share: Cisco is helping network administrators reduce the time it takes to deploy and the cost of supporting video across a network
  • Medianet software on Cisco's network routers and switches now includes a new suite of features to accelerate troubleshooting and enable IT to provide a consistent user experience from any device.
  • By automating many aspects of network management, Cisco is enabling enterprises to efficiently speed video deployment, monitor and prepare for video's impact on the network, and provide any video to any device on the network.
  • Three new features, Performance Monitor, Mediatrace, and IP Service-Level Agreement Video Operation (IP SLA VO), make it easier to design video-ready networks, by generating synthetic video streams so network administrators can accurately plan for video's impact on network bandwidth. In addition, IT can now analyze the performance of video traffic over the network, track each step of video delivery "hop-by-hop" to accelerate diagnostics.
  • These new medianet capabilities are available now globally on Cisco's Integrated Services Routers Generation 2 and Cisco Catalyst® switches.
• Share: Cisco is optimizing video content distribution across the network, enabling organizations to support rapidly growing video usage from headquarters to the branch
  • One in three executives worry that their network is unprepared for increased video adoption across their organization.ⁱⁱ Cisco is helping organizations manage the video load on their wide area network (WAN) through advancements to the Cisco Enterprise Content Delivery System.
  • The ECDS family of video distribution products, announced in June, optimizes bandwidth utilization and minimizes network impact as video travels across the network. ECDS works together with Cisco WAAS to form a complete WAN optimization solution for video, applications and data with standalone appliance and WAAS virtual blade options.
  • Cisco is highlighting future advancements to the ECDS portfolio, by introducing a new deployment option with an ECDS virtual module for the Cisco Integrated Services Router Generation 2, called the Cisco Media Delivery Engine 50 ISR Virtual Blade (MDE 50 IVB). With this new module, any customer with a Cisco router at the network edge will be able to optimize how they cache and stream video to branch offices. By removing the need to deploy a video distribution appliance at each branch office, this new module will be able to help customers control the cost of extending video applications across their organization.
  • Availability of the MDE 50 IVB will be announced shortly.

Supporting Quotes
Rathika Suresh, director of information technology, Pymble Ladies' College
"Video is a key element of Pymble Ladies' College's mission to create a 21st-century educational environment to enable continuous learning and collaboration. Cisco provided Pymble with a turnkey solution: the MXE 3500, which provides the flexibility and scale necessary to deliver any video, from recorded guest lectures to student-created projects, in any format to any device, eliminating the need for multiple video platforms with no integration. Students can access classroom video content at any time from Cisco Show and Share, creating communities to share their ideas and enabling learning beyond the classroom."

John Maass, Manager of Conferencing Technologies, Moffitt Cancer Center
"At Moffitt Cancer Center, we have embraced video as a way to educate and engage our staff, clinicians, and research teams, and to provide information and outreach to our affiliates, patients, and the public. Through the integration between Cisco's TCS [Telepresence Content Server] and MXE 3500 [Media Experience Engine] solutions into Cisco Show and Share, we are able to easily capture video and publish it, creating an archive of knowledge. In addition, the accuracy and ease of use of Cisco's Pulse analytics video tagging make it simple for anyone to search and browse for the video clip they need. Cisco's end-to-end video solutions have enabled us to increase social communication throughout our organization and provide a complete video experience."

Guido Jouret, chief technology officer, Emerging Technologies Group, Cisco
"The explosion of personal video use over the past few years has created an increasing appetite for similar high-quality experiences in the enterprise. With the innovations announced today, Cisco is moving beyond the traditional use of video for communications and unlocking the full power of video to reach anyone, on any device at any time. Cisco's architectural approach to video simplifies IT support while providing employees with a simple, intuitive experience for participating in, creating, sharing and consuming video."

Additional Resources:

• Enterprise Video Content
• Business Video
• Enterprise Video Architecture
• For more information about Cisco's video news and activities, visit the Video Blog.

Many of the products and features described herein remain in varying stages of development and will be offered on a when-and-if-available basis. These products and features are subject to change at the sole discretion of Cisco, and Cisco will have no liability for delay in the delivery or failure to deliver any of the products or features set forth in this document.

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ⁱ New research according to a new Horizons study by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group. Horizons is a multimodal research and analysis program designed to identify business transformation opportunities fueled by technology innovation.
ⁱⁱ "Business Video is Already Mainstream in the Enterprise" blog post by Rick Hutley

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