Can your network handle HD video?

For Tarleton, this is a long way from the grass-roots movement that brought video to his company in 2000. "Videoconferencing began in one business unit because the leaders wanted to communicate with their people without traveling to each site for town-hall meetings," he says. Since then, with a directive from top executives, he has moved under the IT umbrella and supports more than 300 live Webcasts a year. "Many are brown-bag sessions so that engineers can knowledge-share," he says.

Val Oliva, director of product strategy for Foundry Networks' Enterprise Business Unit, says it's exactly this kind of uptick in corporate-sanctioned, user-generated content that is forcing IT organizations to retool their networks. From posting training videos on the corporate intranet to creating on-the-fly, live feature sheets for sales teams, organizations are becoming treasure troves of video-based information, he says.

Many companies have makeshift production studios, and most laptops today are shipped with video cameras. "IT groups have to start thinking of everyone as not only a consumer of video, but also a possible source," Oliva says, adding this has dramatic implications for capacity planning and network design.

Start with policy

Before IT teams can start reengineering their physical architecture to support widespread use of video applications, they have to be clear about corporate policy, says Scott Morrison, research director for enterprise network services at Gartner. "Bandwidth-hungry video applications create such an order-of-magnitude demand on the network that when they aren't deployed as part of a corporate strategy, you run into problems," he says. Without proper planning, organizations can wind up draining the coffers for bandwidth and other piecemeal solutions.

Morrison recommends, first, that companies analyze their current video use. He suggests using automated network monitoring probes to discover who is using which applications. "Also, determine how much traffic is being generated for each type of video functionality," he says.