BlueJeans

Krish Ramakrishnan and Alagu Periyannan founded BlueJeans Network in 2009, completing the development within six months of technology trials. Prior to founding the company, Ramakrishnan worked at Accel Partners, and Periyannan was the CTO of Blue Coat Systems as well as a tech lead at Apple Inc. Stu Aaron, the company's chief commercial officer (CCO), 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 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". 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 one billion minutes' worth of meetings during 2014, a tenfold increase from this year." The acquisition was completed on May 15, 2020, with the service rebranded as "BlueJeans by Verizon." On August 8, 2023, Verizon announced that it will shut down BlueJeans in the first half of 2024.{{cite web |last1=Peters|first1=Jay|title=Verizon is shutting down the videoconferencing app it bought for $400 million ==Video conferencing==

BlueJeans by Verizon provides a proprietary cloud-based video meetings service, interoperable with software development kit, etc., that connects 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 operates with business conferencing solutions such as Cisco, Microsoft Lync, StarLeaf, Lifesize, and Polycom as well as consumer services like Google. CRN described BlueJeans services as "endpoint agnostic", meaning it does not discriminate and can work with any video call 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. 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 conferencing 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. In November 2012, University Business honored BlueJeans with its 1st Annual Readers' Choice Awards in the category of Video Conferencing Services. In 2013 CIO magazine ranked BlueJeans No. 3 among the top ten cloud startups of that year, and Business Insider ranked it among its top 21 cloud startups. ==References==