IP video is creeping into businesses, from the Web, through videoconferencing, and via on-demand training videos, and the volume is only going to grow. Trouble is, video takes up lots of space and competes with all the other information on corporate networks. In lieu of expensive bandwidth upgrades, some companies are turning to WAN optimization controllers to keep the video rolling.

Florida law firm Ruden McClosky's videoconferencing performance used to be clunky and inconsistent. "It had kind of that Max Headroom performance going on, and it would drop occasionally," says IT director Ben Weinberger. "It was noticeably bad at times." Since the firm bought 10 Steelhead appliances from Riverbed Technology, video performance has improved. The appliances compress other traffic on the network, freeing bandwidth for video. The version of the Steelhead software Ruden McClosky is running also prioritizes traffic, so Weinberger has set video to move across the network before any other type of traffic except voice over IP.

Some WAN optimization vendors recently have come out with new ways to facilitate networked video. Blue Coat Systems last month signed partnerships with enterprise video distribution and management companies Media Publisher and Jubilant Technologies so that their software automatically caches on-demand video in Blue Coat appliances at branch offices. They also push live streaming video to the appliances for multicasting, and administrators can quickly remove outdated video from the appliances.

Before Blue Coat teamed with Media Publisher and Jubilant, the only way to use WAN optimization to facilitate streaming video was to send e-mails with links to the video to a network administrator, who would then upload it to the Blue Coat device or tag the location of the stream so the device would identify and accelerate it. Now Media Publisher and Jubilant organize and manage all video on the network, uploading it to the Blue Coat device.

In December, Packeteer Networks announced a plug-in to its WAN optimization software that differentiates sources of Web-based Flash video; Packeteer customers can now block YouTube or ESPN entertainment videos from running across their networks, while giving the green light to training videos, for example.

Other WAN optimization vendors haven't focused specifically on video acceleration. "For us, it hasn't reached that critical mass yet where people are saying, 'Look, video is a major pain on our network, and we want you to help with that,'" says Apurva Davé, Riverbed's director of product marketing. Many standard features of WAN optimization work for video. Riverbed can prioritize video traffic if needed or accelerate video that's delivered over HTTP.