Verizon Business is cashing in on its deal to buy video conferencing company BlueJeans by launching the service in India with Bharti Airtel. It also announced some new partner integrations and features for its BlueJeans Events platform.
After being a distributor for BlueJeans for several quarters, Verizon Business closed out its deal to buy the company in May. Verizon's timing for buying BlueJeans coincided with the explosion in video conferencing sessions due to the coronavirus pandemic as millions of employees started to work remotely. Verizon paid just under $500 million for BlueJeans.
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India is a nascent market for BlueJeans, and Airtel, along with Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea, is one of the nation's largest service providers. With more work-from-home policies, Airtel BlueJeans will enable virtual meetings across India for millions of users. Financial terms of the partnership weren't released.
As part of the partnership, Airtel will offer enterprise-grade video conferencing solutions under the Airtel BlueJeans brand name to enterprise customers. The combined offering includes a cloud point of presence in India, which enables low latency and improved quality of service (QoS) for India-based customers.
BlueJeans will also be fully integrated with Airtel’s network, including its data centers. Airtel BlueJeans will also offer an integrated audio solution, giving its customers dial-in options to join the meetings.
“Companies of all sizes around the world have seen the requirement for reliable, high-quality video conferencing services and require trusted partners to ensure the highest level of security,” said Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg in a statement. “We are proud to come together with Airtel to help more Indian organizations benefit from our world-class communication product during this work-from-home era and beyond.”
New partner integrations for BlueJeans Events
Over the past three months, BlueJeans saw an eight-fold increase in its BlueJeans Events usage as organizations outgrew the limitations of traditional webinar platforms. BlueJeans Events enables organizations and individuals to deliver multi-purpose digital events at scale.
With the increased usage of BlueJeans Events, it has added partner integrations with Salesforce, Splash and TicketSocket. For event monetization, TicketSocket provides front-end, white-label payment and ticketing systems that are integrated with BlueJeans Events. The solution can promote and collect payments for live streaming events with gated access.
With Salesforce, BlueJeans Events can capture attendee data with hands-free lead tracking for both companies. Users can automate their marketing and sales follow-up efforts with integrated data sync from the webinar attendees.
Event organizers can now streamline the event promotions and follow-up processes by blending Splash with BlueJeans Events. They can also create invitations and promotion pages, dynamic registration forms, and participant outreach plans to drive attendance for any type of virtual event hosted on BlueJeans.
BlueJeans Events is also launching a solution for YouTube Live, similar to the existing Facebook Live integration, that provides event producers with one-click access to broadcast their BlueJeans Event over YouTube Live for expanded coverage.
BlueJeans Events is making it easier for event hosts to leverage Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) to stream their BlueJeans Events on additional social media platforms including LinkedIn Live, Microsoft Stream, and Twitter’s Periscope.