California-based company Blue Jeans Network has launched its cloud-based video conferencing solution in the UK.
Having already infiltrated the US market, the company recently hired former Cisco and WebEx executive James Campanini to grow its presence in EMEA after securing $50 million of venture financing.
The service called Blue Jeans is all about multi-vendor interoperability. In the past, trying to hook up a Skype call to a Polycom video conferencing suite would've been a no-go situation, but moving the processing to the company's cloud means that any service can call any other so long as its protocol is supported. Desktop PC users can also call mobile devices, and vice versa.
The company says that this allows businesses to make better use of existing video conferencing equipment - whether that's fully-fledged video conferencing suites, mobile devices or desktop PCs - in addition to video collaboration services. Users can also make Blue Jeans to Blue Jeans calls through a browser.
Do more
Stu Aaron, Chief Commercial Officer at Blue Jeans, told TRPRo that the company is aiming to give employees an incentive to 'do more' video conferencing and allow people to work from home more often.
He said: "A lot more people want to work from home because of congestion when commuting. We're seeing better broadband and mobile networks like 4G, and what we're finding is that more businesses are finding their networks more geographically dispersed.
"They need to connect people in different timezones, whether that's at home or work, in a way that's economical and scalable. The ROI [from using Blue Jeans] is instantaneous. If you save one trip that'll pay back one month's service."
Stranger danger
Call quality is determined at each caller's end based on network connection, and a personal ID system means that businesses can call clients and partners without having to 'buddy up'.
The service also lets users change the size of shared documents in conferences, such as powerpoint slides, and their own video thumbnail using an on-screen slider.
Aaron said that the service uses a network of legacy hardware to provide the scalability needed to host large conference calls. The company currently has data centres operational in Europe, North America and Asia.
He said: "We said let's take the existing bridges and network them together and call it a cloud, one that was built to support many connections. We borrowed principles from vendors such as Akamai, who built global CDS and intelligent routing.
"We also borrowed from Amazon and what they did in the cloud, building computing and elasticity that scales very easy and linearly, running high performance software on a distributed basis on industry standard x86 hardware."
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