Using mobile phones or laptop computers and streaming video websites, employees will conduct more impromptu live video broadcasts of internal company meetings or presentations at industry conferences in 2011, said an enterprise networking expert.

Nigel Hawthorn, VP EMEA Marketing from Blue Coat Systems, the technology leader in application delivery networking, recently provided a glimpse into the future of enterprise networking in 2011.

The live video casts will put greater load on enterprise WAN links and Internet gateway connections and often bringing them to total saturation, he added.

High definition live and on-demand video will become more prevalent on the Web, creating more sizable “video floods” that can take over enterprise WAN links and Internet gateways; 3D video on the Web will still be a novelty and have almost no impact on corporate networks, said Hawthorn.

Traffic from the Web, including text, graphics, audio and video, will represent more than 75 per cent of corporate network traffic, up from 50 per cent in 2010, while social networking will become the second largest class of Web traffic on corporate networks, behind live and on-demand Web video, Hawthorn predicted.

More businesses will consider social networking a key business tool and will begin implementing policies to allow social networking communication but control the use of social media games and other applications, according to the Blue Coat VP.

In 2011, companies will more rapidly embrace SharePoint or cloud-based document management, shifting away from traditional server-based file shares and putting less importance on WAN optimization for the CIFS protocol and more on HTTP optimization and acceleration, Hawthorn said. – TradeArabia News Service