Vendors would have us believe that video is poised to become a huge part of the corporate network, but one of those vendors--Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO)--is warning that it shouldn't be handed over to cloud providers. Large volumes of video flowing over the Internet gateway onto employees' computers would swamp the network, warns Guido Jouret, vice president of enterprise video and CTO of emerging technology at Cisco.

Speaking at the Cisco Live Conference, Jouret said hosted video would create a "single point of failure and chokepoint," reports Julie Bort at Network World. Not only is the volume of video traffic particularly large, but the nature of it is particularly sensitive. There's little tolerance for things like latency or jitter. "Video is like the acid test of the quality of your infrastructure," Jouret said.

What's more, businesses may find that many employees need regular access to the same video at the same time for different purposes. Retailers, for example, may use surveillance video to detect patterns in shopper behavior or glean other insights that lead to improved customer service. Many copies of often-viewed video would need to be cached in some kind of content distribution network (which Cisco will be happy to provide) in close proximity to the viewing device to minimize latency. 

Cisco's newly launched Enterprise Content Delivery System not only stores and delivers video, but it is slated to help identify content within it. The company's Show and Share webcasting product includes automatic tagging, which applies key words to the content. The same process could be used on a company's archive of legacy video. 

If Cisco's forecasts are on the mark, you'd best get prepared for the video onslaught. "In three years, 91 percent of all network traffic on the Internet will be video," Jouret said. "That means file transfers, BitTorrent and other data will be the remaining 9 percent. So over the lifetime of your employees, they will work with video as the dominant data type. It's going to shape networks. It's going to make networks bigger and it's going to make networks smarter."

For more:
- see Julie Bort's article at Network World

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