Verizon to 'sunset' Blue Jeans vidconf platform
- Reference: 1691555470
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/08/09/verizon_business_sunsets_bluejeans/
- Source link:
The US telco [1]acquired BlueJeans in April 2020 – a time when the $500 million price tag looked like a good deal as much of the world started to work from home while COVID-19's initial assault on humanity commenced.
"The combination of BlueJeans' world class enterprise video collaboration platform and trusted brand with Verizon Business's next generation edge computing innovation will deliver highly differentiated and compelling solutions to our joint customers," BlueJeans CEO Quentin Gallivan told The Register at the time.
[2]
Just over three years later, Verizon Business told us "changing market conditions in a post-pandemic landscape" mean BlueJeans will be "sunset."
[3]
[4]
The sun comes up after every sunset – but BlueJeans is not coming back. Verizon Business told us it is "refocusing its efforts on other key priorities" but didn't elaborate.
The telco offered strong clues about those priorities on its Q1 2023 earnings call, when discussing the appointment of Kyle Malady as CEO of the business unit. Investors were [5]told [PDF] "His focus is clear: drive sustainable growth in mobility and deliver on the revenue growth opportunities within fixed wireless, 5G private wireless and mobile edge compute solutions."
[6]
BlueJeans is none of those things.
[7]Telecom giants dial up the heat on suppliers: It's not you, it's your CO 2
[8]Cheating carriers could cost web-starved Americans billions in subsidies
[9]Zoom updates its legalese explicitly promising not to feed vidchats to AIs
[10]It's official: EU probing bundling of Teams with Microsoft 365
It's not hard to guess what Verizon Business means when it says "changing market conditions in a post-pandemic landscape" are the reason for BlueJeans unravelling.
Vidchat networks aren't cheap to run and BlueJeans faced plenty of competition from the likes of Cisco's WebEx and Google's WorkSpaces. During the pandemic, Microsoft Teams came captured tens of millions of users with a very keenly priced bundled offering.
And of course, Zoom became a byword for this sort of collaboration – so much so that the term "Zoom fatigue" gained currency to describe the phenomenon of boredom and frustration with online meetings.
Businesses have picked up on Zoom fatigue – and the decrease in spontaneous collaboration it engenders – and responded by insisting their staff return to physical offices. And once a worker is in the office, they’re less likely to need a video chat.
[11]
Beyond those secular trends, Verizon Business just appears to have been less than interested in BlueJeans: the service didn’t rate a mention on either the Q1 or Q2 2023 earnings calls. Nor was collaboration deemed worthy of discussion.
But a "cost efficiency program" with a target of finding $2 billion to $3 billion of annual savings by 2025 was discussed.
9to5Google has [12]reported a letter sent by BlueJeans to its customers that states "BlueJeans Basic and free trial offerings will be discontinued effective August 31, 2023." It's unclear when paid users of the service will have to decide whether their migration plans will see them zoom to Zoom, team up with Teams, or select other alternatives that don't have names suggesting gentle puns indicating an intention to become a customer. Waving for WebEx doesn't work. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/16/verizon_business_acquires_bluejeans/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZNNjxX@MRFec0upYotVYQAAAAQM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZNNjxX@MRFec0upYotVYQAAAAQM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZNNjxX@MRFec0upYotVYQAAAAQM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.verizon.com/about/file/66881/download?token=ioyXcSWh
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZNNjxX@MRFec0upYotVYQAAAAQM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/04/jac_emissions_best_practices/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/09/inaccurate_broadband_coverage_maps_usa/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/08/zoom_ai_legalese_update/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/its_official_ec_to_stick/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZNNjxX@MRFec0upYotVYQAAAAQM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://9to5google.com/2023/08/08/verizon-bluejeans-shutting-down/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
> Vidchat networks aren't cheap to run
... when you have to rent the bandwidth off someone else.
How did they fuck this up?
There's a bit more to it than bandwidth, especially for large groups. But the technology wasn't the problem: telcos have an inherent difficulty in selling such services to their competitors. So, while they love the idea of killing the OTT competitors, they'll never manage it.
Streaming is a commodity.
WebRTC is an open standard supported by every modern browser. Which means that anyone can spin up their own P2P chat service in a few hours, with the only costs being a dirt cheap ICE + relay + node.js server.
I'd say that that would have a lot to do with the collapse of streaming services, once investors and customers realised this.
Re: Streaming is a commodity.
WebRTC is an open standard supported by every modern browser. Which means that anyone can spin up their own P2P chat service in a few hours, with the only costs being a dirt cheap ICE + relay + node.js server.
Sure, and that can be ok-ish for ad-hoc video calls. Proper video conferencing might involve setting up dedicated video conferencing suites, effectively studios with decent lighting, sound, desk positioning, document camera.. And if it was a Cisco Telepresence solution, the approved Bob Ross paint schemes. Those were not cheap, and product placements in shows like 24 may have contributed to it's cost. I think the main challenge though was traditional teleco thinking and trying to offer it as a 'service'. So a bundle of charges and tarriffs for per-call and per-minute video conferencing, which then increased overheads for billing and BSS.
Cisco used to pitch it this way as another revenue stream, even though they didn't really have the BSS stuff a telco and it's customers need and expect. It was also eye wateringly expensive for what it was, which was essentially some PCs, cameras and screens. Especially with all the support and maintenance charges loaded on top. Once properly set up, the results were very good. Problem is competitors realised that a telco's core business is pushing bits from A-B, per-application or service billing is generally a ball-ache, and in the end, video conferencing is just data. So started offering alternatives that just involved setting a CoS/QoS profile to prioritise conferencing and rent the tin with some support and consultancy. So it pretty much went the same way as being able to rent call bridges as a service. It's one of those apps that was hard to do in a good'ol switched voice/video world, but a whole lot easier to do in an IP world. Especially when there's a multitude of 'free' basic conferencing tools bundled into OSs or available as apps.
So there's a slew of 'free' stuff which is good enough for most purposes, and cheaper alternatives available from other telcos or service providers. I'm just suprised it took so long for Verizon to kill it off. Over a decade ago I had to do the Cisco certified telepresence thing and there were some designers from Verizon and other telcos there. They seemed a little shocked when I said we weren't charging, and had no intention of charging per-stream.
Re: Streaming is a commodity.
If, by anyone, you mean a competent IT person, then yes. But can that be easily made to function with a company-wide contact list and joining multiple meetings between multiple people who only to click on the invitation to join ?
Or is this a case of here's the URL, type it in your browser and add your userID to join ?
Because that will not work well for most people, I'd wager.
Re: Streaming is a commodity.
How about scale?
It's also worth giving Google credit for pushing for WebRTC. Without it we'd probably still be a world with a couple of incompatible and expensive providers.
$500 million
Verizon spent half a billion on a video chat service I have never heard of - even during the pandemic.
Did it make any money out of this acquisition, and if so, how much ?
Because to me at least, it looks like money down the drain.
Re: $500 million
It was mainly a corporate service, though pricing was competitive. It was good enough, which meant it didn't really offer enough over the competition to be worth keeping. One thing it didn't have when we dumped it was an easy way to share files, ie. PDFs referred to in the discussion. Easy enough to implement but if you don't have it when the customers need it, you'll get dumped.
that's a shame
We previously used Blue Jeans (with its amusing abbreviation) at work. It was actually pretty good. The audio in particular was (in later iterations) awesome, particularly when wearing stereo headphones. They'd really sorted out cleaning up the sound from all the attendee's mics, and had the tech to place them precisely in audio space. It was really impressive.
BlueJeans...I haven't heard that name in a long time...