Blue Jeans Network, a Silicon Valley based tech company with a R&D facility in India, is helping enterprises and businesses to take benefits of visual communication without making any fresh investments.
Its cloud based video collaborative service enables businesses to optimally leverage its existing video conferencing infrastructure by making it more scalable and interoperable.
No vendor lock-in
Blue Jeans Network has a service that is interoperable across vendors, supports mobile devices and browsers. Also, it easily runs on different platforms and conferencing programmes.
According to Blue Jeans Network’s Co-Founder and CTO, Alagu Periyannan, most large tech companies today use video conferencing solutions but its not very popular among enterprises.
“Enterprises prefer audio conferencing rather than video due to various factors like infrastructure, high bandwidth, operational cost and others. However, we have built a cloud based video bridging system that is interoperable with other systems, scalable and doesn’t need any new infrastructure,” Periyannan told Express Computer.
Connecting people
Company’s core aim is to enable people connect with each other any time, any place and from any device through its cloud based video conferencing service. “Our idea is to allow users to select the systems of their choice for audio or video conferencing,” said Periyannan.
This subscription based service has different packages to meet needs of corporates and enterprises. A basic service plan allows the host to bridge video calls up to 25 users and can scale up to 100 users by upgrading the plan. Simply, users need to bridge the call or dial-in the number from mobile device or open a web link/ URL in the browser to get connected with the host.
In order to make the service available worldwide, Periyannan informed that his company has set up servers and networks globally.
Besides, it has set up data centres in five different locations that includes West and East Coast of US, Sydney, Amsterdam and Singapore. Blue Jeans’ cloud service and data centres are powered by Equinix and Amazon.
Managing infrastructure and cost
Higher internet bandwidth, infrastructure and overall operating cost are among the key factors, why video conferencing is still unpopular today across businesses and enterprises. But, Blue Jeans have tried to solve these issues through technology.
“Blue Jean’s cloud service uses a compression algorithms based technology that easily adopts different video conferencing systems and even operates at low bandwidths,” Periyannan said.
Taping markets in North America and Europe
At large, company is offering its service in North America and Europe markets with the key focus on B2B segment. Facebook, Pandora, Foursquare, Expedia, Shopzilla, Standford University, University of North Texas, CBS, ARM, RedHat and many more are on Blue Jean Network’s client list.
At present, company is not looking at direct sales in India and other South Asian markets. According to Malhotra, company will start direct sales and marketing in India in 2015.
InterCall, a global reseller and distributor of video conferencing solution, is offering Blue Jeans’ service in Asia. While, in Australia, company has partnered with country’s largest telco Telstra, which offers video conference service to customers under a co-branded service.
Likewise, Level 3 Communications, an American multinational telecommunications service provider offers Blue Jeans’ service in North America and Europe region.
IPO on cards
Given the unique service offering, the company has been successful in raising funds for business expansion. In past four years, the venture has successfully raised around $100 million through series fundings from Excel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Battery Ventures.
Periyannan said that he is not looking to raise more funds at this point of time. “However, company may go public around 2015 or 2016,” he added.
In terms of growth, though Periyannan shied away from sharing percentage or figures, but he hinted that it has quadrupled over the first and second year.
“We have around 30-40 percent share in the video conferencing market globally. However, video conferencing market, which is around 200 million minutes is quiet smaller than audio market that estimated around 200 billion minutes annual usage globally. According to market estimates, audio conferencing market is worth around $15-20 billion,” concluded Periyannan.
