In 2020 in the early days of the pandemic Verizon Business purchased BlueJeans, a digital conferencing company, for $400 million.
We haven’t heard too much about BlueJeans since then. But today, Verizon Business released an announcement about its BlueJeans Gateway cloud video interop (CVI) solution for Microsoft Teams (which sounds like a mouthful of industry jargon).
Fierce Telecom reached out to Peter Verwayen, head of product management for BlueJeans by Verizon, to get an update.
Verwayen said BlueJeans has a few business channels. It serves enterprises and small-to-medium businesses with its meetings technology. And it also provides a platform for events, which can handle as many as 150,000 attendees. Although typical events are town halls, corporate trainings and the like with about 5,000 attendees.
He said, “The most significant thing we’ve seen is there’s been a huge shift to Microsoft Teams.” The pandemic drove a consolidation in the meetings business with Teams and Zoom grabbing market share and taking away from BlueJeans’ meeting business.
However, BlueJeans has found a niche with Microsoft, helping the company with videoconferencing “rooms.” And that’s what BlueJean’s announcement this week is about.
Verwayen said there’s lack of support for interoperability between various standards-based room systems from vendors such as Cisco, Lifesize and Poly.
He said these types of room systems use SIP to connect. BlueJeans began its life as a company by “being an interoperable bridge in the cloud that allowed organizations to meet across their firewalls,” he said. “That’s where BlueJeans made our name where people have a lot of different types of devices that didn’t talk to each other. We were the first any-device, anywhere conferencing solution.”
Now that some workers are returning to offices, organizations want to use their costly, legacy meeting equipment, but at the same time they need to connect to remote workers, who will be using the Teams app.
“The challenge is we’re kind of in this in-between state,” said Verwayen. “We can make them all work with Teams."
BlueJeans said it’s added new features to its gateway for Teams. Those features will provide more customization and analytics features, including:
• Ability to show participant names on screen while content is being shared through the room system;
• Lobby Notifications on Teams-enabled room systems to allow moderators to accept those in the meeting waiting room from their Teams desktop/mobile client;
• Presentation Rights feature, which prevents in-room attendees from presenting/sharing during a Teams Meeting, unless permitted;
• Raised Hand notifications viewable in the meeting room in the top right corner;
• Locked Meeting status prevents unwanted endpoints from joining a meeting;
• Enhancements to fix audio/video (AV) quality of service.