And, by the way, kicking some dirt at bitter rival Vidyo.

“A couple of weeks ago we crossed the million minutes-a-week level,” Blue Jeans chief commercial officer Stu Aaron told me yesterday. “We’ve got thousands of paying customers.”

The company has been monitoring usage patterns on its existing payment plans — a minutes-based plan, a per-user plan, and a per-device plan — and is unveiling a new option Aaron thinks is the best one yet. It would appear that Blue Jeans customers agree — a hundred of them have been testing the new plan since November 2012, and they grew their usage of videoconferencing at ten times the rate of other Blue Jeans clients.

The new plan sees participating companies pay one annual fee, plus between $10-50 per month for active users — employees who use Blue Jeans videoconferencing at least once per month.

“It’s a site-license option,” Aaron says. “Everyone gets an account, everyone gets unlimited usage, for an attractive low annual fee. All employees have accounts, but you’re only paying for active users.”

The new pricing model will come in hand when competing with videoconferencing rival Vidyo, whose CEO recently called Blue Jeans out. Vidyo’s quarterly growth in billings was 68 percent, he said, while competitors were flat or down. And, he said, a five-person one-hour call on Blue Jeans costs as much as an all-inclusive, unlimited $30-a-month subscription to Vidyo.

Them’s fighting words, as the saying goes, and Blue Jeans accepted the challenge and knocked off the chip.

“That was not a correct statement,” Aaron told me. “Our customers are typically pay cents-per-minute or tens of dollars per month, and there’s no way anyone has an advantage over those price points.”

In addition, he said, Blue Jeans is growing fast, having reached the 50 million annual minute run rate — even assuming no further growth in 2013 — after just over a year in business. That means, Aaron says, that Blue Jeans is probably a quarter of the entire videoconferencing market.

“There’s 100 billion minutes a year used for audio conferencing, and 200 million minutes a year in video conferencing,” he said. “Since we’ve exceeded the 50 million minutes a year run rate, we’ve grown to 20-25 percent of the market.”

The new plan seems to be a hit.

Not only are existing customers adopting the plan and increasing their use of videoconferencing, 25 percent of Blue Jeans new customers signed up in April were signed up on the all-you-can-meet plan.

That’s impressive, and given Blue Jeans’ ease of use and wide compatibility with a vast array of devices and software (including Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize, Microsoft Lync, Skype, Google Video, WebRTC Browser, and smart mobile devices), it portends well for the company’s future sales as well.

One small caveat before small businesses get too excited: To get the $10/user price point, you need over 10,000 users. Less, and you’ll be somewhere between $10 and $50.

photo credit: iandavid via photopin cc

Shapiro’s talking about videoconferencing pioneers Cisco and PolyCom. He’s talking about Innovator’s Dilemma-style growth. And he’s talking about $17 million in new funding the company is announcing this morning to expand even faster, building its total venture capital raised to $116 million.

Vidyo, the company that supplies the technology for Google’s Google+ Hangouts and Nintendo Wii’s videoconferencing, is disrupting the fast-growing video communications world on at least three levels, Shapiro said.

One is technology: moving from the big, expensive telepresence rooms to simple, cheap, built-in components. Another is moving from on-premises solutions to the cloud, and the third is Vidyo’s business model: revshare partnerships with carriers and other partners, like NTT Telecommunications in Japan, Google, and 24 other new telecom partnerships inked recently.

The technology transitions are key, the company says.

“PolyCom and Microsoft say they’re doing it, but not well,” Shapiro states. “We are by far the leader here.”

And his model, he says, is also much more competitive than innovative upstarts like Blue Jeans Network, because he’s betting on a lower price point and higher numbers. Blue Jeans Network, which offers in-browser video conferencing that connects to legacy systems as well as integrations with partners like Salesforce, charges $.30 per minute per leg of the call, Shapiro said, meaning that a five-person one-hour call on Blue Jeans costs as much as an all-inclusive, unlimited $30-a-month subscription to Vidyo.

“I believe the price point is just starting to erode,” Shapiro says.

Which is why Vidyo’s sales model is partners, who then leverage the power of their own networks for Vidyo and grow its sales without Vidyo having to maintain a large sales staff. The strategy seems to be working: Vidyo partners like Arizona State University, which is using Vidyo on its Internet2 deployment, are increasing their usage of videoconferencing by an average 18 percent per quarter. And CERN, the European science facility with the world’s largest particle collider, uses Vidyo so intensively Shapiro told me it has 15X Blue Jeans call volume alone.

“We want to price equivalent to a voice call,” Shapiro says. “Our competitors offer an inferior product for more money: Blue Jeans 15 time more, and other competitors 300 times more.”

I’m sure his competitors would have something to say about that, and it’s certainly the case that Blue Jeans and others offer features that Vidyo does not. But with $17 million new cash in his pockets, Shapiro is focused on the future.

“Things are going great, but we always find ourselves working on many things,” he said. “We want to make sure we have the resources to take advantage of the opportunities we see … it’s almost a land grab in the industry.”

The $17 million is almost all from existing investors, including in some cases general partners’ own money. Two-thirds of it is from Triangle Peak Partners. With the new cash, Vidyo will grow headcount from 285 to about 320, CFO David Kaminsky said.

photo credit: courosa via photopin cc

Essentially, interoperability is beating closed systems.

Previously, while anyone with a $10 webcam in a cheap laptop could start or join a conference via their browser and be a first-class client at the video-conferencing table, Microsoft’s Lync users could only join conferences. They could not share their desktops to users of other videoconferencing systems as they could with other Lync systems.

Now, Lync users will be first-class citizens in heterogenous technology environments too.

“Tens of thousands of Lync endpoints have already participated in Blue Jeans meetings,” Stu Aaron, Blue Jeans Network’s chief commercial officer, said in a statement. “With this new bi-directional HD desktop sharing feature, Lync users can now also share their own desktop content, including presentations and other documents, the way they are used to, in high definition with other meeting participants.”

In other words, the world of video conferencing and desktop sharing is far bigger than the Lync userbase, but now Lync users can use their investment to broadcast and receive from anyone, anywhere, on virtually any system.

Blue Jeans Network, whose corporate goal is flipping the annual 100 billion minutes businesses spend on audio conferencing into video, is not a stranger to first-evers. The company also was the first to integrate video-conferencing tools into Salesforce.com.

Now the company’s technology is often serving as the glue that ties together disparate video-conference systems.

According to one system integrator, Blue Jeans helps businesses integrate room-based conferencing systems with Microsoft Office 365, Lync with Cisco or Polycom hardware, or simple browser-based technology with any of the high-end solutions.

“Blue Jeans acts as a simple, reliable, and scalable solution to allow businesses large and small to benefit from interoperable video conferencing without the headaches of on-premise solutions,” Neil Setchell, CEO of systems integrator and consulting firm ExtraTeam, said.

The new technology is fully implemented in the Blue Jeans cloud, requires no software or hardware, and is included with every Blue Jeans subscription, the company said.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Blue Jeans Network, the company that offers super-simple video conferences in the browser, is announcing the first-ever videoconferencing integration with Salesforce.com.

The company, which we covered back in June, was also the first to allow videoconference participants to join conferences originating on legacy videoconferencing equipment simply from a common web browser. Now Salesforce.com clients will be able to initiate or join video conferences without leaving their SalesForce application.

Source: Blue Jeans Network

Blue Jeans’ video conferencing in a browser

Video conferencing is a hot and rapidly-evolving space. Vidyo, the company that supplies the technology for Google+ Hangouts, recently revealed VidyoWay, its solution for seamlessly connecting multiple video endpoints, each with potentially different video conferencing solutions. And industry heavyweights such as Polycom are releasing new products and services to compete with the startups.

Blue Jeans has pinned its competitive differentiation on dead-simple implementation, integration, and use. If you have a web browser, you can use Blue Jeans. That simplicity overlays significant technical complexity, as chief executive Krish Ramakrishnan alluded to in a statement:

“We are the first and only company in the world today that can conduct a single video meeting using endpoints as disparate as Cisco, Polycom, LifeSize, Skype, Microsoft Lync, Google, and even a browser.”

Blue Jeans said it will demonstrate the new technology at DreamForce 2012, the annual Salesforce.com conference.

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With $25 million in new funding, and a new first-ever-in-the-world technology that allows web surfers to join video conference calls originating in traditional teleconference systems, they might just have a shot.

Blue Jeans Network’s Stu Aaron

VentureBeat spoke to Stu Aaron, Blue Jeans’ chief commercial officer.

“There are three main problems in the adoption of traditional video conferencing,” Aaron says. Existing solutions, according to Blue Jeans, suffer from excess complexity, incompatibility, and expense.

Solutions that require IT support, or are not compatible with competitors’s videoconferencing technologies, or cost too much are the reasons for the lack of enterprise adoption of video for remote meetings, according to Aaron.

“So we’ve created an interoperable video conferencing service in the cloud,” Aaron told VentureBeat. “Customers get a virtual meeting room, can use any browser to join or create a meeting, and everyone who is invited gets a series of options to join a meeting.”

That’s the key innovation Blue Jeans is announcing today: the ability for browser-based access to meetings, regardless of where they were initiated. Users can join conference calls via Skype, their web browser, classic videoconference or telepresence rooms, Google Video Chat, or Microsoft Lync.

“We are the only company in the world right now with a license to join Skype users to non-Skype users,”  says Aaron. “Not even Microsoft can connect Microsoft Lync to Skype yet!”

In addition, no other solution, the company says, enables users to join video conferences from their browser, even when the video conference is with participants who are using enterprise H.323 systems such as Polycom, Cisco, LifeSize, or Sony.

(H.323 is a technical protocol for video transfer that major enterprise videoconferencing solution providers support.)

The desire to connect all possible video conferencers runs deep in Blue Jeans. Aaron explained that with traditional videoconferencing rooms and options like Skype or Lync, about a billion people have the technology and software to participate in video conferences.

“But there’s still billions that don’t. Now you can join a Blue Jeans meeting with a browser — Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, or Firefox — and two to three billion more people can join.”

That means that the video that originates in a telepresence videoconferencing room that costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars now plays nice with the free browser on a cheap camera-equipped netbook. And soon, with your smartphone as well: An iPhone app will be out in a month that will enable video conferencing on Blue Jeans conference calls.

Companies such as Facebook are currently using Blue Jeans, as well as Match.com, the Sierra Club, and Gawker Media. And the service worked well when I tested it.

I joined a meeting by clicking a link on a webpage, which automatically opened Skype. After granting Skype permission to join, I was instantly connected to a virtual conference room. Detecting my low bandwidth — I blame kids and YouTube while I’m in my home office — the service automatically took video but provided only audio, maximizing available capacity.

On the call, we had a company representative just using his browser, another using Skype, and another using some other teleconferencing solution. Everything worked smoothly.

Commercialization of the technology is the company’s next major focus and the reason for the $25 million in new investment from New Enterprise Associates, Accel Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners.

The traditional barrier to videoconferencing has been cost.

“Audio conferencing is around $.05 to $.10 per minute,” Aaron said. “Currently, video conferencing is about $1 a minute.”

Blue Jeans intends to make its technology available with enterprise customers for between 10-20 cents per minute, per participant. That’s close to audio pricing, and it may be enough to convert some companies to video.

Andrew Davis, a senior partner at the Wainhouse Research firm, agrees: “With the addition of browser access, the company is showing how video conferencing may finally become the ubiquitous tool we’ve long anticipated.”

Blue Jeans Networks is based in Mountain View, California, and has about 100 employees. The company has raised a total of $48.5 million in venture capital.

Image credit: ShutterStock