In a presentation at Cisco's annual financial analyst conference, Cisco introduced MediaNet, a network platform designed to carry high-quality video and other rich media to and from multiple systems, including TVs, PCs and mobile devices. Talking about the launch in India, Rajesh Chainani, Senior Vice President, Service Provider, Cisco India & SAARC, said "India is very much a part of the plan. Today, peer-to-peer networking has overtaken the web. An aggregation of market estimates by various analysts suggests that the addressable video market is expected to cross US$50 billion by 2013 and overtake the market for peer-to-peer technologies.

"As part of the MediaNet vision, Cisco sees video being reformatted for a variety of clients within the network and giving users an easy way to find and redistribute clips. Cisco's long-term aim is to help carriers earn a return on investment in infrastructure. MediaNet, including Cisco's set-top boxes, can capture and utilize data pertaining to each subscriber's interests with their consent, which can help carriers sell value-added services."

Cisco is targeting video, virtualization and collaboration as key areas of growth. Chairman and CEO John Chambers said in the conference that the video is changing work and life while also driving the sales of Cisco's infrastructure. Virtualization, a newer theme for the company, also represents a big opportunity because the network is the element that touches every computing and storage resource in an enterprise, he said.

Chainani said that Cisco's vision is to provide 'in-person experiences' with a breakthrough in collaboration, communication and entertainment. Today, solutions are reliable and the experiences can be created because of better technology. The network is ready and becoming more developed and intelligent. For Cisco, this is a game changer not because it has the network as the platform, but because this is an opportunity for them to evolve that network to become a platform not only for data traffic but also for all forms of media.

MediaNet will start rolling out over the next few months and will include new hardware platforms as well as software upgrades to the existing systems.

The key target audience for this product would be the carriers. Talking about the target audience, Chambers said that in the long term, Cisco can help carriers such as AT&T earn a return on investment in infrastructure because it can understand the subscribers better than the carriers themselves.

"The company has sold about 1,000 TelePresence units to 200 enterprise accounts," Marthin De Beer,senior vice president of Cisco's Emerging Technologies Group. But Cisco is also pushing downmarket with the technology.

Talking about their marketing strategy of MediaNet in India, Chainani said, "Our marketing strategy will be to promote 'any media, anywhere, any device' concept where the network as the platform adjusts to deliver a great experience, no matter what the device or video stream is."