The volume of traffic on the Internet will cross one Zettabyte (10 raised to 21 bytes) by 2020 and a large part of this will be unstructured data and video traffic. There will be new applications and services and hence more content on the Internet. That will put a huge load on public networks, which will need to evolve and become more intelligent. This was the basis of a technology keynote titled ‘Zero to Zetta’ delivered by Padmasree Warrior, CTO, SVP Engineering and GM Enterprise Segment, Cisco systems at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum on 14 Feb in Mumbai.

“Today there are 13 billion devices connected to the Internet. By 2020 there will be roughly 50 billion devices connected. Along with that, there are more applications and services being created. That means the content on the Internet is going to increase. So by 2020 there will be a Zettabyte of information traversing through the Internet,” said Warrior.

Warrior suggested that the network will not be only about connectivity – rather it will be about experiences and collaboration.

She also predicted that video traffic will quadruple by 2014 and in fact two-thirds of mobile traffic will be video.

“That means we will soon be doing conferences like this (Nasscom) virtually (using video). At Cisco we do our annual sales conference virtually, and so we cut down on travel and save costs,” added Warrior.

Analysts have said the explosion of devices will lead to increased adoption of the Cloud, as services and content will need to be pushed to these devices via the cloud, be it personal clouds or enterprise clouds. Warrior regards Cloud technology as a “consumption model” for delivering IT as a service.

“With the explosion of devices cloud is taking off much faster than people thought, and by the end of this year, roughly 70 percent of enterprises will be consuming cloud in some form,” suggested Warrior.

While many data centers are being virtualised today, the other trend that Cisco observes is  desktop virtualization. While this makes it easier and more cost effective to provision and manage desktops, it becomes a challenge to deliver rich media on virtualized desktops for technical reasons. But Cisco is working towards delivering streaming media applications on virtualised desktops, informed Warrior.