Video in Cisco's sights

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Video is the next big opportunity for Cisco, according to its head of emerging technologies.

Making a keynote speech at this year's Cisco Networkers conference in Cannes, Marthin de Beer, senior vice president of emerging technologies and internal ventures at Cisco said that video technology is ripe for re-invention.

"If you think about some of the video industries and market places out there; things like cable tv, video conferencing and video surveillance, it is really boring because there has been very little innovation in these spaces for decades."

He said these were three examples where video systems are ripe for re-invention and he thought Cisco could drive a "tremendous amount of innovation and see a world of far greater video convergence".

He said connecting users and devices to content or video sources has been done before and is relatively straightforward. But de Beer said that the ability to go to full unified video communications where devices can be connected to users through an intelligent set of services in the network at any time or anywhere has not been done.

"The big opportunity for us is to move away from silos and to create a full integrated experience," said de Beer.

He said IPTV, mobile video, desktop video and Cisco own new video conferencing product TelePresence, were such examples of the opportunities for Cisco.

"When you look at video from a broad perspective there are multiple markets, taking us into the home with triple play convergence, into the enterprise with video collaboration and bringing video and TV onto mobile phones and video security, we believe when you converge those and deliver them as a set of services across the network, this can make dramatic changes to the home environment, to the workplace and also when you are on the go."

He said applications like entertainment, collaboration and safety were three of the most interesting areas for the company to go after.

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