This is absolutely the coolest thing ever. We’re going to get to see our CEO’s latest televised speech, delivered directly in full high definition to all of our branch office users. Now is that cool or what?

(Granted, it would be a lot cooler if it was Jessica Alba’s latest movie, but still, you’ve got to admit that having our CEO’s face in HD on our screens is pretty exciting, right? Right?)

How is this possible, you may ask? Well, it’s because Cisco has just launched Cisco WAAS Release 4.1, which greatly expands WAN optimization capabilities to the branch IT services delivery platform. WAAS (or Wide Area Application Services), as I’ve mentioned previously, is a complete optimization solution that accelerates our company’s applications over WAN – so we get LAN speeds over wide-area networks covering branch offices.

The latest release offers new application-specific acceleration of CIFS, MAPI and HTTP apps such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft Sharepoint. And (this is the part that really gets me going), wide-scale delivery of live video which doesn’t require bandwidth upgrades and messy re-configs.

So how powerful is the new WAAS? Here’s an interesting bit of news: NBC is making broadcasting history by broadcasting from Beijing Olympics 2008, straight onto viewers’ PCs and laptops where they can access 2,200 hours of video that they can play back on demand, as well as 3,000 hours of highlights, rewinds, and encores.

How did they do it? Through WAAS, of course. Rather than sending 400 video shot selectors and editors to Beijing, NBC is using Cisco WAAS between Beijing, New York and Los Angeles. Editors and shot selectors can access gigabyte-sized video files over the WAN with the same performance as if they were stored locally.

Hmm…maybe my CEO’s speech won’t do justice to the new WAAS after all.

More info:

The WAAS Release 4.1 announcement

A quick introduction to Cisco Application Networking Solutions

A detailed design guide to WAN optimization for Cisco networks