BlueJeans Network

History

Krish Ramakrishnan and Alagu Periyannan founded BlueJeans Network in 2009, the development of which ended in six months of field trials for the technology. Prior to founding the company, Ramakrishnan was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners and Periyannan was the CTO of Blue Coat Systems as well as a former executive for Apple Inc. Stu Aaron, the company's chief commercial officer, described the early work as, "Ultimately, what we're trying to do is make video conferencing as comfortable and as casual as your pair of jeans." The company was able to acquire $23.5 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, NEA, and Norwest Venture Partners, and launched its commercial service on June 29, 2011 with Ramakrishnan as CEO.

Upon launching, Channel Insider wrote that, "BlueJeans officials said the company's any(ware) video conferencing offering will enable people using disparate video collaboration technologies not only enterprise-focused products like those from Cisco Systems and Polycom, but also more consumer-facing offerings from companies like Google communicate with each other without having to worry about new infrastructures or protocols. Essentially, Blue Jeans takes advantage of the cloud, creating a meeting environment in which visual communications users of any products can engage with anyone other people, regardless of what products they use."

The company sought to open up video communications to companies across the board, including small businesses and freelancers, in addition to the traditional market of larger corporations. In its first 75 days, BlueJeans grew to 4,000 subscribers from 500 firms. Upon launching, Deutsche Telekom became the company’s first major channel partner. The agreement between the firms was to develop "a scalable, interoperable videoconferencing solution in Europe by the end of the year". In 2011 and 2012 it added other channel partners, including Intercall, iVCI, York Telecom, and AVI/SPL. BlueJeans has been used by more than 300,000 people worldwide. In 2013 BlueJeans Network expanded its user base to the UK and Australia. In November 2013, Ari Levy of Businessweek wrote that, "BlueJeans has raised about $100 million in venture funding and estimates it will stream 1 billion minutes worth of meetings during 2014, a tenfold increase from this year."

Video communications

BlueJeans provides an interoperable cloud-based video communications service that connects many users across different devices, platforms and conference programs. Every BlueJeans member has a private “meeting room” in the BlueJeans cloud to schedule and host conference meetings. It brings together business conferencing solutions like Cisco, Microsoft Lync, Lifesize, and Polycom with consumer services like Google. Information Week has written that, "BlueJeans is best known for bridging room-based videoconference services with consumer options like Google Talk, and doing it on an impromptu basis," in a "quest to make videoconferencing as easy as audioconferencing". This service can be used directly through BlueJeans Network or through its partner companies. For example, in 2012 BlueJeans Network began powering the videoconferencing services of InterCall.

CRN described BlueJeans services as "endpoint agnostic", meaning it does not discriminate and can work with any videocall software or technology, including smartphones. This allows it to bridge between non-room-based videoconference services as well, regardless of the device or service used. In 2012 Telecompaper wrote that the "Interoperable video conferencing services specialist BlueJeans Network has rolled out a multipoint control unit (MCU) that gives customers the opportunity to experience multi-way videoconferencing in the cloud. This offering allows customers to license a variable number of concurrent connections (known as 'virtual ports') from BlueJeans".

Michal Lev-Ram of Fortune wrote that, "the company is mostly an enhancement -- not a threat -- to existing videoconference equipment makers. And whichever company ends up leading the charge, there's no question that interoperability is an inevitable must in videoconferencing, just like it was in text messaging on mobile phones. The more use corporate customers can get out of their videoconferencing systems, the more they'll invest in buying them." In contrast to this, Ari Levy reported in 2013 that BlueJeans Network and similar services had begun to cut into the revenues of larger, room-based hardware system developers, due to their greater flexibility and accessing the market of smaller businesses. That year BlueJeans Network also partnered with Salesforce.com, providing BlueJeans run video communications to all Salesforce clients through its "Chatter" tool. Forbes also wrote that BlueJeans "will also enable the sharing of presentations, documents, and video clips in real-time" for Salesforce customers. Other customers for BlueJeans Network include Facebook, Foursquare, and MIT.

Awards and recognition

In February 2012, Frost & Sullivan awarded its Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award to BlueJeans. The Wall Street Journal named BlueJeans a runner up in the Software category of its 2012 Innovation Awards. In September 2012, the Telecom Council awarded BlueJeans the Graham Bell Award for Best Communication Solutions in its annual SPIFFY awards. In November 2012, University Business honored BlueJeans with its 1st Annual Readers’ Choice Awards in the category of Video Conferencing Services. CRN named BlueJeans one of the 25 Coolest Emerging Vendors for 2012. Gartner also named BlueJeans to its Cool Vendors Report for 2012.

In 2013 CRN repositioned BlueJeans on its list to number six among its ten top start-ups. In 2013 CIO Magazine ranked BlueJeans #3 among the top ten cloud startups of that year, and Business Insider ranked it among its top 21 cloud startups.

Philanthropy

Over the 2012 holiday season, BlueJeans partnered with the Military Association Benefits Group and Military Comm Networks to provide free video communications for U.S. soldiers and their families.