BlueJeans, a Pioneer in video meetings, reaches end of life – and we can learn three significant things with its sunsetting.
Verizon Business’ announcement on August 16 that it was sunsetting BlueJeans came as a blow to many of us in the UC and collaboration industry who have closely followed the service for many years.
BlueJeans was a pioneer in delivering high-quality meeting experiences with both integrated hardware and software. Via its partnership with Dolby, BlueJeans brought innovations to the market that included support for spatial audio, allowing meeting participants to sense the position of remote participants, as well as sophisticated noise cancellation. Many of you may even remember the BlueJeans noise-cancelling demos at past Enterprise Connects where the presenters used a hair dryer to show how BlueJeans cancelled background noise during meetings. And BlueJeans brought features to meetings such as the ability to add notes and capture clips to meeting recordings, long before many of its competitors. In our research we found that BlueJeans was well liked by its customers with BlueJeans recently earning top honors in our MetrigyMetriStar Awards for meeting applications.
Unfortunately, BlueJeans wasn’t well positioned to take advantage of the rapid adoption of video meetings during the COVID-driven shift to work-from-home in 2020. Zoom, through its freemium model, quickly captured the lions’ share of the consumer market while it continued to make inroads in the business market as well. Microsoft and Google gained share by bundling their meeting apps into their broader workplace collaboration suites. And Cisco was able to leverage its already extensively deployed Webex conferencing app to expand its video footprint. Meanwhile other stand-alone meeting vendors like GoTo Meeting and UberConference became part of larger UC suites.
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