Cisco Touts 'YouTube-Style' Service

SAN JOSE, Calif. (TheStreet -- Cisco(CSCO Quote) has launched a secure YouTube-style service for enterprises, as well as a hosted email offering in an attempt to challenge Google(GOOG Quote).

The networking giant gave its first hints about its social networking plans earlier this year. Dubbed "Show and Share," the service runs within corporate firewalls, providing a higher level of security than traditional social networking.

"It's internally located so that you can't share these videos externally unless you decide to," Murali Sitaram, Cisco's vice president of collaboration platforms told TheStreet. "You deploy it in your data center -- you can put [security] policies around it."

This means that access can also be limited to certain divisions or individuals within a company. Clearly aimed at firms that need to quickly distribute marketing, training and other corporate information, Sitaram says that internal videos are becoming important business tools.

"With the economy the way it is, most of us are trying to cut back on travel, and video is the next best way to do that," he said. "We feel that this is the new form of rich communications within the organization -- this is [also] something that can be stored for the future."

Sitaram told TheStreet that a half dozen Cisco customers are already trying the technology, which was originally code-named "C-Vision," but refused to divulge their names.

YouTube, which was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, has become one of the most influential consumer technologies of the last 10 years. The Internet giant has nonetheless been questioned over its ability to wring revenue out of the video-sharing site. In its recent third-quarter conference call, however, Google said that it is "monetizing" more than a billion YouTube views a week.