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Given Blue Jeans' ease-of-use story, Aaron said the company isn't opposed to pricing the service for consumers. But rather than position Blue Jeans as a "freemium" video product scaling up to business users, the company wants to make clear that it is a business-focused videoconferencing service.
"For enterprises that have already invested in conferencing rooms, we give them a way to get much better utilization and tap into their telecommuters and remote workers," he said. "That allows us to focus on the business community first."
Blue Jeans' founding team has deep expertise in the networking channel. CEO Krish Ramakrishnan was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Blue Jeans investor Accel Partners, and was also previously general manager for the server virtualization business at Csico and CEO of Cisco-acquired Topspin Communications. Ramakrishnan's fellow co-founder Alagu Periyannan, also Blue Jeans' CTO, was formerly CTO at Blue Coat Systems and an Apple executive. It was Aaron, formerly a vice president at Bloom Energy and a Topspin executive, who introduced the co-founders.
Accel is among Blue Jeans' venture capital backers, alongside New Enterprise Associates and Norwest Venture Partners. It raised $23.5 million in a Series A round of funding, and among its five-person board of directors is Charlie Giancarlo, former Cisco executive vice president and current managing director at Silver Lake.
And what's in the name? According to Aaron, the company wanted to stand out from the legion of video startups that have tucked "vid-" "video" or similar prefixes and suffixes into their monikers.
But it's more about what the name evokes, he said.
"Ultimately, what we're trying to do is make video conferencing as comfortable and as casual as your pair of jeans," Aaron said. "Make it comfortable."
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