How cool, having a video conference using the browser of my choice (Google Chrome) on my Mac desktop to discuss Blue Jeans and their ongoing success federating users and numerous platforms. James Matheson, VP Marketing at Blue Jeans Network extended an invite to me, and after downloading only a browser plugin; I had the opportunity to catch up with what's been going on at Blue Jeans Network.
In a prior post, Blue Jeans Network: Interoperability For Skype, Lync and More, their 6 months of carried video traffic exceeded 1M minutes. According to James, they are now comfortably carrying 40M minutes of video conferencing through their network. But this isn't the only indicator of success, because James elaborated that they are now seeing about 30% of that traffic being browser based.
Blue Jeans, I believe, is making progress in what James calls their goal of interoperability by bringing all platforms together. But they didn't leave out simplicity and making it easy to participate in or set up a videoconference. WebRTC may be still young, but the folks at Blue Jeans embraced WebRTC and debuted their release in June 2012. Thus the dropoff of Skype usage, and now 30% of traffic being browser based.
Having more than 10,000 Lync endpoints using Blue Jeans for the past 18 months is another notch in their belt. So I asked James about the hosted providers, and right away he told me about their channel and direct sales team and another success in providing their service to Salesforce. The other element of their offering is desktop sharing, and it too is easy. But Blue Jeans didn't settle for "just" desktop sharing; they provide bi-directional HD desktop sharing.
Repeating myself from the prior post--it's easy to understand why Blue Jeans focused on making their service easy to use, interoperable and affordable. Interoperability will be key to achieving the growth that's projected for videoconferencing--Ovum has estimated that videoconferencing spending will reach $1.1bn in 2016, growing with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.5% from 2011 to 2016.
James also stated that, "The Blue Jeans service is starting to go viral, and availability of bandwidth and cameras is all we really need." Just read what Brent Kelly wrote in: As the Original Web Was to Information, so WebRTC Will be to Communications
"Imagine a future where a billion and a half devices are voice- and video-enabled through the web browser. Seeing is believing at the WebRTC Conference-Within-a-Conference at Enterprise Connect.
So it's fair to say that 40M minutes of videoconferencing, up from 1M minutes, carried by Blue Jeans Network in such a short time, along with a 30% adoption rate of their WebRTC based browser, should make believers out of everyone.
