Verizon to End the BlueJeans Service
Think back to the eventful year of 2020 – a time when virtual connections became a lifeline during a global pandemic. Verizon paid a substantial amount of money to acquire the BlueJeans service. Founded in 2009, BlueJeans wasn’t just another video conferencing platform; it bridged the gap for on-premise conferencing services and even introduced the SIP dial-in feature for MS Teams meetings.
In August of 2023 Version has now announced that the BlueJeans service will be shut down with almost immediate effect. The Basic and free trial offerings will be discontinued effective August 31, while users of the Pro and Enterprise licenses will presumably lose access at their next renewal date.
BlueJeans’ closure marks the second of the popular CVI providers disabling their services. As posted previously, the Poly RealConnect service was also recently discontinued in favour of a Poly partnership with interop powerhouse Pexip. Read about that here: Poly and Pexip Empowers Seamless Collaboration
How will users be affected?
There are two scenarios in which users with on premise services may now find themselves.
Users using the BlueJeans service to provide interop options to their video endpoints may find themselves unable to make connections they have become accustomed to. In this instance, customers could look to either Cisco Webex or Pexip Cloud registration as a solution. Customers still operating on premise infrastructure may be interested in using Cisco Webex Control Hub to make their devices “cloud aware”, which provides many of the cloud based benefits without requiring a full migration. Alternatively, it might be time to fully embrace the cloud solution.
The second and likely more prescient situation is that organisations face losing their CVI connector and will no longer be able to connect to their MS Teams calls using a SIP connection. Pexip and Webex both provide excellent CVI connectors, which each have their own strengths and weaknesses, although it is worth noting that Pexip is currently running a special rate for customers affected by the closure of BlueJeans.
If you are affected by the closure and still need a plan in place, reach out to ISDM today.
Written by
ISDMs Solutions Architect,
Ben Heys
