Today's data networks won't cut it as foundations for real-time applications like voice and video, experts said last week at the Interop New York 2008 conference.

Users considering deployments of telepresence, collaboration and unified communications (UC) must carefully consider the design of their networks and ensure the switches, routers, bandwidth and WAN links are optimized for carriage of that traffic, along with data. That's why router and switch vendors are baking more intelligence into hardware and software so their devices can recognize and devote appropriate network resources to the unique traffic.

Recent announcements from Foundry Networks, Enterasys and Force10 underscore these initiatives -- all addressed support for next-generation environments, such as those harnessing video, unified communications, IPv6 and embedded security that is identity based and policy driven. Cisco, meanwhile, reiterated its intentions to focus squarely on video, virtualization and collaboration as key revenue growth and product development drivers going forward.

And HP ProCurve is hearing the siren song from customers about what the company's switches should be capable of.

"They say, 'I want my network to be UC-ready,' " says Manfred Arndt, distinguished technologist and R&D convergence architect for HP ProCurve.

With good reason. Room-sized telepresence and videoconferencing systems have recently undergone a period of "hypergrowth," according to Wainhouse Research. The current US$1.2 billion market grew 39 percent from 2006 to 2007, according to the firm.

"We're at a tipping point for video where enterprises are seeing it as a critical new tool that they can use," said John Bartlett, principal of consultancy NetForecast, during a conference session on designing networks for telepresence. "Part of it is the network finally being ready to support these applications."

HP and other vendors are already supporting standards such as LLDP and LLDP-MED, and eventually will add support for PoE Plus and Energy Efficient Ethernet for automated discovery, configuration and power management of video and voice systems, and wireless access points. Edge switches use these standards and other proprietary and nonproprietary intelligence to match and enforce policies for user and endpoint network access and resource privileges.

But the onus is on switch and router vendors to keep adding intelligence to their edge devices, where it's as close to the user as possible, and scalable. And that intelligence must include recognition and accommodation of real-time traffic like voice and video, as well as a slew of other considerations that take switches and routers well beyond traditional data packet transport.