High Definition Video Conferencing and High Definition Performance Management

As a technology professional and a multi-media buff, I get to see a lot of "cool" video tools and toys, many of which have fallen short of their promise. With that mildly jaded view, one 'cool thing' coming out of the TelecomNEXT show I attended a few weeks ago was telepresence.

Cisco revealed plans for a telepresence enterprise video conferencing system, which aims to be more “lifelike” with life-size high-definition video and directional sound technology. This sounds similar to Hewlett-Packard's new HP Halo Collaboration Studio offering. Just imagine how cool it would be to meet colleagues, partners, or customers on the other side of the Pacific as if they were face-to-face with you. I would not mind joining the “infrequent flyers” club at all. Sound far-off? According to Cisco, it could be available this summer or fall.

While the deployment of bandwidth-rich IP video and voice applications such as “telepresence” have the potential to improve productivity and operational costs, it will require a more robust network infrastructure. More enterprises will probably need to move to a higher speed network infrastructure, 10 Gigabit in the core, in order to meet greater demand for network-bandwidth consumption of those multiple-megabit IP video streams. I know - what a shocker - Cisco is pushing companies to upgrade their networks.

The other side of the coin though is management. Enterprises will definitely require sophisticated application and network performance management tools to assure their business services are working well alongside with this pseudo-real-life video application running across the network. Even if a company has a huge 10 Gigabit pipe running between major corporate sites or data centers, bandwidth might not be a problem yet, but monitoring what other applications are running across that pipe will still be important. On the LAN side of the stream, network professionals will surely need to see more granular performance information to assure the smooth delivery of high definition video streams. In other words, high definition video conferencing needs high definition network and application performance management.