Interop: Video is the Key To Network Staff Morale

I’m sitting in a Cisco sponsored media roundtable session at Interop about the Video Ready Campus and I just heard something that I was startled by.

Robert Whiteley Principal Analyst and Research Director at
Forrester Research argued that ‘video is a good  thing
from a morale perspective for networking people.’

In Whiteley’s view, enterprises want video and when networking people are able to deliver, it helps to show the value of networking people (and IT in general). Whiteley sees the enterprise move to video as a real trend at this point in time even though he admitted that at first he was skeptical.

Whiteley also briefly shared some details from an Forrester study that showed that a third of surveyed companies rated video as a deployment priority. Furthermore, Forrester is forecasting that by 2012, 80 percent of organization in North America and Europe will have rolled out video deployments.

Cisco also brought in Markus Bost CIO of Adena Health System which is a
hospital system in southern Ohio who explained in very real terms how
video saves costs and lives. IT (in his case Cisco hardware) was the
key enabler

So while YouTube may well have the catalyst for getting video on the networking radar screen, video may yet prove to be the next true killer app for enterprise IT as well.