Following last week’s blog post titled “MCUs are dead, Long live the MCU!", I received a lot of great feedback (both direct and from the analyst community) and requests to learn more about how we approached these challenges and innovated to address them.

So let me shed some light on our approach and how we addressed them to build our virtualized cloud-based MCU alternative.

When we started Blue Jeans a few years ago we had one simple goal - we wanted to make business video calling as easy and affordable as audio calling. Unlike many startups that start with a piece of technology and try to find applications for it, we started with that very simple use case of business video calling. We then embarked on finding the right technologies that could help us solve it. It boiled down to ease of use, interoperability and cost. And at the center of this old world of business video calling was this beast called the MCU. We had to slay the beast to unlock the next level in the game!

BCNET, a not for profit organization serving British Columbia’s higher education and research institutions, found the right desktop and room system video collaboration solution with Blue Jeans after evaluating 17 vendors. BCNET’s members think Blue Jeans has helped improve their face to face collaboration.

Anyone should be able to pickup a smartphone or tablet or walk into a room with a video screen and be able to make a video call to anyone anywhere around the globe. We have all the technology to make this happen, and yet this goal seems to be always around the corner. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? I am getting impatient. Will the world of video conferencing/chat protocols ever converge to make widespread video calling a reality?