“There are 200 billion minutes of audio conference calls done around the world annually,” says Alagu Periyannan.

It is this huge chunk that Alagu is eyeing through his latest venture, Blue Jeans Network that facilitates video conferencing in offices.

Blue Jeans provides an interoperable cloud-based video conferencing service that connects participants across a range of devices and platforms.

Normally, video conferencing platforms are not interoperable, which means the user of one platform cannot connect to another one on a different service. This is what Blue Jeans is trying to change and make video conferencing as easy as slipping into a pair of blue jeans.

An electrical engineering graduate from BITS-Pilani, Alagu, now in his mid-40s, did a Master’s in Computer Science from North Carolina State University at Raleigh, before joining Apple, where he worked for about eight years. After that, Alagu was in a couple of start-ups in Silicon Valley. He teamed up with another Valley tech veteran and entrepreneur-in-residence, Krish Ramakrishnan, to start Blue Jeans Network in 2009.

“Blue Jeans was a simple concept. We felt that video was starting to get adopted quite a bit,” Alagu, Co-Founder and CTO, says during a recent interaction in Bangalore, where the company has an R&D centre. There were different companies offering video conferencing on different platforms, and there was Skype.

“Yet you walk into any business, all the work was done through audio conference calls,” says Alagu. The reason for that was cost and complexity. “You walk into a conference room and you see a speaker phone on the table, within 30 seconds you can get into a conference call if I give you a phone number and a meeting ID to punch. If you walk into a conference room that has all the video equipment, you don’t even know how to start a call. Most of us are technology savvy, we still struggle,” he says.

First prototype The first prototype of an interoperable system was developed out of the company’s office in India, then in Pune, even before Blue Jeans got funded. Rather than build high-end hardware, they wanted to achieve it by off-the-shelf systems. They have clients in the US and have started selling in Europe.

Video conferencing is more expensive than audio conferencing – about 20-30 cents a minute versus up to 10 cents a minute for the latter – but Alagu sees this going down over time.

He estimates that video conferencing accounts for a billion minutes now and Blue Jeans should have 30-40 per cent of that now. Blue Jeans has raised $100 million from venture capital firms through several rounds. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Blue Jeans has 300 employees, including a 100 at its Bangalore centre.

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