The $50 million round of funding was led by venture capitalist firm Battery Ventures, with participation from previous Blue Jeans investors including Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Norwest Venture Partners. It puts Blue Jeans' total investor funding to-date at roughly $100 million.
Stu Aaron, chief commercial officer at Blue Jeans, said the funds will be used to fuel the company's sales and marketing efforts, as well as its international expansion. Just as importantly, though, the funds mark a turning point for Blue Jeans, he said.
[Related: Mitel Creates Dedicated Unit To Drive MiCloud Sales ]
"It represents a significant milestone for the company," Aaron told CRN. "It represents, if you will, an ascension into the big leagues, as we transition from being a buzzy startup and disruptor to a significant player the UC and business collaboration space."
This new round of funding comes as Mountain View, Calif.-based Blue Jeans is experiencing record growth, Aaron said, with more than 3 million users now leveraging Blue Jeans' cloud-based meeting room service.
According to Aaron, Blue Jeans has also managed to capture more than one-third of the video conferencing services market since its formal launch in June 2011. The bulk of these market share gains, he said, are at the cost of videoconferencing and UC incumbents like Cisco and Polycom.
The reason for this, Aaron explained, is that Blue Jeans' videoconferencing service is hosted via the cloud, meaning it eliminates the need for multipoint control units (MCU) offered by more traditional UC players like Cisco and Polycom. In fact, he said, Blue Jeans estimates that it has eliminated the need for between $150 million and $200 million worth of MCU sales in the past year alone.
Blue Jeans' differentiates its videoconferencing service as being "built from the cloud up," consumed as a hosted service that allows users to host, schedule and manage their own videoconferences via a Web interface. The service is also interoperable, so it can work across different video and audio protocols, bridging the gap between systems such as Cisco TelePresence and Skype.
In June, Blue Jeans marked its two-year anniversary with the launch of Blue Jeans 2.0. The second-generation service includes a number of updates, including one-click access to join meetings, new in-meeting controls for managing sound, layout and participating rosters, along with the ability to schedule Blue Jeans meeting directly from Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.
Blue Jeans 2.0 also lets administrators set up group-level permission controls to define which specific endpoints are available to users.
Blue Jeans has been steadily building up a channel presence over the past two years. Aaron said the company now has between 60 and 70 partners worldwide, including traditional A/V integration VARs, managed services providers and OEM partners. Aaron said some of the new investor funds could be used to fuel channel growth, as well.
"With the new funding and the international expansion, in particular, I think you'll see quite a bit more [partners] as we move forward," Aaron said.
PUBLISHED SEPT. 19, 2013
related stories
Video
trending stories
sponsored resources

Cysurance
Cyber Insurance 360

Tenable
Cyber Risk 360

Application Integration 360

Carbonite
Cloud Storage 360

NPD
Industry Trends 360

Veeam
Veeam

Comcast Business
Comcast Business Learning Center

Cato Networks
SASE & SD-WAN 360

CyberPower
CyberPower

Channel Chief Showcase

CRN Showcase

APC by Schneider Electric
Digital Services for Edge Learning Center

Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies Cloud Learning Center

Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies Server Learning Center

Dell Technologies
Microsoft HCI Solutions from Dell Technologies Learning Center

Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies Storage Learning Center

BlackBerry
BlackBerry Learning Center

Fujifilm
Fujifilm

Wasabi
Wasabi

Acer
Remote Workforce 360

Webroot
Webroot Learning Center

Cyber Protection 360

Cradlepoint
5g for Business 360

eSentire
Managed Detection and Response 360

Smart 3rd Party
3rd Party Maintenance 360

Trend Micro
Trend Micro Learning Center

HubStor
Cloud Backup 360

VMware

EPOS
EPOS

Sophos
Sophos Cybersecurity Learning Center

iboss
Cloud SASE Platform 360

Sherweb
Sherweb

Vonage
Vonage

Vertiv
Edge Computing Learning Center

Comm100
Collaboration & Communications 360

Hitachi Vantara
Hitachi Vantara
