Better Together: How BlueJeans and Poly Collaborate to Deliver the Best Meeting Experiences
No matter how great a technology, it’s often not that impactful to bring it to market without a commercial partner. Having a strategic ally can make the technology’s reach broader and the customer experience better.
At video conferencing services provider BlueJeans by Verizon, we’ve had the opportunity to work with technology companies that are leaders in their own fields. Our strategic alliances have become so important to our business expansion, enabling us to make an impact on so many customers across a broad range of industries.
I recently caught up with one of our partners, premium audio and video devices maker Poly, when I appeared as a guest on Poly Weekly News with Natalia Herrera Azabache, Senior Director for Global Alliances at Poly.
Together with our host David Danto, Poly’s Director of Unified Communications Strategy and Research, we discussed how the alliance between our companies has added great value to our customers.
Designing a Better Experience
BlueJeans and Poly have partnered to bring seamless and native meeting experiences to customers. Our unique combination enables customers to enjoy BlueJeans by Verizon’s software and Poly’s hardware as a package, so they get the best integration and audio and video quality.
As noted by Natalia, there are two key aspects to our collaboration:
- engineering teams collaborating to design and provide seamless experiences, delivering broadcast-quality visuals, beautifully engineered audio, and out-of-the-box simplicity
- BlueJeans by Verizon certifying that Poly’s video conferencing devices and headsets integrate flawlessly with the BlueJeans platform, providing meeting experiences that fit every work setup and workspace.
“Bringing to life the best experiences and making sure that interoperability is something we can manage — and most importantly, [delivering] native experience with those key alliances [or] strategic partners in the marketplace — is really relevant,” said Natalia.
As she pointed out, keeping strategic alliances is important because users of collaboration platforms like BlueJeans Meetings are increasingly looking to have the same experience across all the devices they interact with — from cell phones to laptops.
“For us to be able to deliver that experience across many of our devices, across different platforms, enables us to serve a plethora of functions within an organization.”
It’s even more important now to ensure consistent experiences as organizations shift to hybrid work arrangements — and given that many are using multiple platforms at the same time.
“Being able to make sure that [different] platforms are working together and that we can deliver those experiences across those platforms is really important to win [customers’] hearts,” said Natalia.
Expansion Into as a Service
To help customers build collaborative hybrid work environments, BlueJeans and Poly have expanded their alliance to make Poly’s Android BlueJeans Rooms experience available via a subscription mode. With BlueJeans Rooms-as-a-Service now on Poly Studio X30 and X50, companies can easily transform how staff engage in hybrid meetings through an offering that combines BlueJeans Rooms software, Poly hardware, maintenance, and support.
This option gives customers the flexibility to outfit their new conference rooms with the best tools from a single vendor — at a lower ownership cost.
What’s Next
As Natalia highlighted, a strategic alliance is not just defined by video conferencing experience. “There are a lot of things that get integrated into that alliance, such as contact center, audio, and so forth.”
Alliances are also evolving, as video conferencing platforms change and advance.
“BlueJeans, for example, keeps adding new features, new ways of bringing that cinematic experience to our customers. And we have to evolve with that, as well as adapt to trends or needs of the market.”
Some of the things we’re exploring at BlueJeans by Verizon include delivering even better quality and reliability by taking advantage of advances in mobile network such as 5G. We’re looking to provide a very different experience by letting hybrid workers tap into the power of a network, whether they’re working from home or in the office or are commuting.
For Poly, its strategic alliances will always be valuable.
“We want [providers] that we love working with to be available to [our customers] on the equipment and systems that [they] choose to buy,” said David.
“That’s why we think alliances are so important, because two is awesome. Two is better than one.”
About the Author
Zachary Bosin serves as Vice President of Product Marketing and Communications at BlueJeans Network, where he is responsible for shaping and executing the go-to-market strategy for BlueJeans’ award-winning meetings platform. He was most recently Director of Solutions Marketing at Veritas, where he led messaging, campaign strategy, and content development for the Digital Compliance portfolio. Previously, he served as an Analyst at the world’s leading member-based advisory company, CEB, now Gartner. Zach received his MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and holds a B.A. in Political Science from Duke University.
