Verizon says it will buy Blue Jeans Network, Zoom competitor, reportedly for under $500 million
U.S. telecommunications giant Verizon is today reported to be acquiring the videoconferencing company Blue Jeans Network in a transaction valued somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 million dollars.
Today @VerizonBusiness entered into an agreement to acquire cloud-based video conferencing and event platform @BlueJeansNet. More details here: https://t.co/iXhQC7FUoA pic.twitter.com/VorUSPzcwL
- Verizon News (@VerizonNews) April 16, 2020
Since the coronavirus pandemic struck the United States with full force about a month ago, the use of videoconferencing app Zoom has skyrocketed, but not without widely reported security and privacy issues, and a new word: "zoom-bombing," when malintents crash into your chat.
Verizon buying Blue Jeans? I don't know, but I can only think of bad things happening to a pretty good product that had advantages over its suddenly popular number one competitor.
More at the Wall Street Journal:
"Verizon Buys Zoom Conferencing Rival BlueJeans, Acquisition comes as the coronavirus spurs unprecedented work-from-home arrangements"
[via techmeme.com]
Observations from Twitter by reporters and others, below.
"Buy Zoom!"
"Ok but it would cost like $80B.
That's 34% of our market cap.""What?"
"OK BUY BLUEJEANS"https://t.co/oGhmVEElL4
- Jason
InItTogether
In our work from home study we just completed, we surveyed a number of industries and companies large and small and could not find many BlueJeans users. https://t.co/FefURc7uMK
- Ben Bajarin (@BenBajarin) April 16, 2020
Gotta wonder: was this deal sealed ON BlueJeans? https://t.co/AmMAPMJ6nr
- Leslie Josephs (@lesliejosephs) April 16, 2020
I am super excited to lose signal 2-3 times during our weekly team meetings AND to get notifications about new @TechCrunch articles during video calls.
I also have heard that they will replace the opening BlueJeans ding with AOL modem sounds! - https://t.co/KhWRN4qilE
- Ben Parr (@benparr) April 16, 2020
Remote work is shifting to permanence for many jobs.
Blue Jean Network built some amazing, but less well known confrence and collaboration tools.
Verizon just acquired the company for $500 million.
Telework will be mainstream post 2020 Pandemic. https://t.co/YPhzCGFjF2
- Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) April 16, 2020
Verizon's deal for Blue Jeans Network is part of an effort to bolster Verizon's business group as the carrier rolls out faster 5G networks https://t.co/L9d2qRqymW via @WSJ
- matt barash (@mjbarash) April 16, 2020
Ah this is a way to get into the news - it was interesting that in most of the #remotework discussions #BlueJeans was not part of the limelight despite having grown in popularity but mostly outside the US https://t.co/Vr0QZIAF3I
- Carolina Milanesi (@caro_milanesi) April 16, 2020
So, win/win https://t.co/DdjxcolK7Q
- Dieter Bohn (@backlon) April 16, 2020
I'm not sure people realize how vulnerable Zoom is to competition. https://t.co/Czgh44YQUZ
- Sameer Singh (@sameer_singh17) April 16, 2020
Verizon to acquire Zoom-rival Blue Jeans for $500m. BJ has 15k customers, and Verizon plans to integrate it with its B2B 5G service.https://t.co/mw4ajveBDj
- Turner Novak (@TurnerNovak) April 16, 2020
It is entirely more likely that Verizon will simply crush BlueJeans to death, but the nightmare of Verizon throttling Zoom and giving faster access to its own product is staring us right in the face. https://t.co/tHC1VjRFRo
- nilay patel (@reckless) April 16, 2020
wonder how much this deal would have been done for in 2019. looks like Blue Jeans cut its headcount by 22% over the past yearhttps://t.co/xMNHotGivd
- Jordan Novet (@jordannovet) April 16, 2020
Verizon doesn't have a stellar acquisition history:
-Yahoo (2017) $4.4B
-XO (2016) $1.8B
-AOL (2015) $4.4B https://t.co/PwGJjI1Dho- Patrick Moorhead (@PatrickMoorhead) April 16, 2020