Blue Jeans Network, a provider of interoperable video conferencing services, today celebrated the one-year anniversary of its video conferencing solution. In its first year of operation the Blue Jeans service has connected over a quarter of a million participants in over 3,000 cities worldwide into hundreds of thousands of video meetings.
By addressing key inhibitors to pervasive video conferencing, and delivering interoperability, ease-of-use, and affordability, Blue Jeans says that it has tapped a market ripe for improvement and appealed to business customers looking for a change to the status quo.
"Our customers have embraced the powerful premise of interoperability which the Blue Jeans Network is built upon," said Krish Ramakrishnan, CEO Blue Jeans Network. "Customer adoption and feedback offer strong validation that we succeeded in our goal to make video meetings as easy, open, and affordable as audio. We've received lots of accolades and attention for this, but watching our growing customer base span businesses of all sizes, shapes, geographies and verticals, has been the most exciting acknowledgement."
Blue Jeans ever-expanding list of customers contains small and large companies alike. Some recent additions include Facebook, Gawker Media, Match.com, NYSARC, Orchard Brands, Stanford University, and the Sierra Club.
"Blue Jeans has removed the frustrating barriers that had previously kept Gawker Media from significant adoption of video conferencing," said Doug Faneuil, Chief of Staff, Technology and Products at Gawker Media. "We'd been experiencing one headache after the next until we found Blue Jeans. Their solution made it surprisingly easy to bring our employees, partners, and consumers together over video. We click a link and it just works. I genuinely love the product."
Blue Jeans also today announced a Series C investment of $25 million led by New Enterprise Associates and including Accel Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners. The three investors all contributed to Blue Jeans' prior rounds of $23.5 million, bringing the total amount raised to $48.5 million. The additional capital will be used to expand sales, marketing, and operations to grow the business, to further the development of Blue Jeans' innovative technology, and to deliver a next-generation experience that will drive the adoption of video conferencing into the mainstream.
New Client-less Web Browser
A significant new innovation also announced today is the addition of Web Browser access to the Blue Jeans service. With this functionality, Blue Jeans is extending video conferencing to the Web by bringing the browser directly into the video conferencing landscape. The new browser access option, currently available in beta, allows participants to connect to a Blue Jeans meeting with nothing more than their Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari browser and a camera. The new feature is ideal for participants who do not already have, are prevented from using, or simply prefer an alternative to, any of the third-party commercial clients already supported by Blue Jeans. More information on Web Browser access is available athttp://bluejeans.com/works-with/browser.
Blue Jeans is the first and only service allowing anyone with a browser and camera to join video meetings with other participants on any combination of H.323 systems (i.e. Polycom, Cisco, LifeSize, Sony, etc.), Skype, Google, Microsoft Lync, or audio connections. That expands the addressable market to the more than 2.3 billion people who have access to the Internet and a browser.
"Blue Jeans' new browser access option is exactly what we've been waiting for!," said Ryan Goodenough, Director of Communications at NYSARC, Inc., America’s largest non-profit organization supporting people with intellectual and other developmental disabilities and their families. "It makes joining a video meeting painless for participants and requires less support from IT to make it work. Great job Blue Jeans!"
In addition to the browser access option, Blue Jeans is also expanding interoperability to include more commercial clients, with added support for Cisco Jabber, Cisco TelePresence Systems and native SIP support. Building upon one of the core tenants of the company, Blue Jeans remains devoted to a client agnostic approach, giving users the ability to choose any method they wish to use to join a meeting.
Other enhancements to the Blue Jeans service announced today include:
- Customized login pages for customers wishing to having their branding as part of the Blue Jeans experience
- Enhanced layout controls for participants on the receiving end of screen sharing
- Single Sign On (SSO) and SAML support to offer IT administrators easy and scalable onboarding for their employees
"With all of these new capabilities, Blue Jeans is raising the bar in video conferencing services," said Andrew W. Davis, Senior Partner at Wainhouse Research. "Blue Jeans first brought cloud, interoperability, and mobility together into an easy meet-me service that was disruptive to the video conferencing status quo. Now, the industry as a whole is taking notice and, with the addition of browser access, the company is showing how video conferencing may finally become the ubiquitous tool we’ve long anticipated."
