Next, companies should decide whether video-use levels are acceptable, and map out a corporate policy defining what users can and can't do with video applications. "Estimate the productivity gains they get from deploying rich media, then decide how much you can afford to spend to achieve that productivity," Morrison says. For instance, will posting training videos for call-center employees lead to better customer service?
Companies also have to determine the priority they want to assign video applications. Are video applications more critical than their VoIP applications? What about their ERP and CRM programs? Morrison says it's important to get everyone on the same page regarding video's role because this will have a severe impact on an organization's architectural design.
Re-architecting a network
As a company digs into the design of its network, it's important to keep in mind video's sensitivity, Cisco's Lasser-Raab says. "People have very sophisticated networks at home, so if they get bad video quality at work, they won't use the business applications. With [VoIP], IT executives plan for 50 per cent to 60 per cent utilization and a spike of 80 per cent. With video, you need to prepare for an even bigger increase," she says.
Sven Rasmussen, a LAN/WAN specialist at CDW, says a good first step is to increase LAN speeds to 1G with 10G uplinks to core infrastructure. "However, this doesn't alleviate the ultimate roadblock of your Internet connection," he says. For that, he recommends creating a budget for the company network. "You have to engineer for all your applications, not just video," he says.
Rasmussen recommends installing content filters for applications that aren't mission critical, as well as for certain types of data and access to unapproved Web sites. Next, companies should roll out traffic-shaping and QoS tools that let them compress, cache and prioritize traffic. "Video and voice are two types of traffic that if they're not received in perfect order, won't make any sense, so make sure those applications get the most bandwidth they need vs. e-mail and HTTP, which can be retransmitted," he says. IT teams won't have to worry about separate tools for traffic shaping and QoS much longer, he says. "With high definition and IPTV gaining traction in the next five years, it'll be commonplace that all networking equipment will feature [QoS] and traffic optimization tools," he says.