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Blue Jeans Network is offering IT administrators a tool designed to give them better insights into how their cloud-based collaboration service is being used.
Blue Jeans officials on Sept. 18 rolled out Command Center, which offers IT administrators greater visibility into how the Blue Jeans service is being used, how it’s performing and what kind of return on investment their company is getting from the service. The Command Center tool includes everything from interactive graphs to detailed metrics into the utilization and quality of the cloud-based service, touching on both historical data and live meetings.
At a time when services such as video conferencing and collaboration are moving to the cloud and employees are increasingly using a range of devices—from PCs to smartphones to tablets—to access the Blue Jeans service from anywhere in the world, Command Center gives IT administrators another tool to leverage the capabilities offered in cloud-based collaboration, according to Blue Jeans Chief Commercial Officer Stu Aaron.
“As thousands of enterprises have embraced Blue Jeans for company-wide deployments, we’ve realized that there are two key constituents for our service: the business users who conduct millions of audio, video and Web conferences on the service every month, and the IT administrators who support them,” Aaron said in a statement. “Both constituents are critical to the successful enterprise-wide deployments we’ve seen.”
The global video conferencing market is in transition, as businesses move away from traditional hardware systems and embrace more software- and cloud-based solutions. IDC analysts have tracked the ongoing decline in revenues for video conferencing equipment over the past several years, saying that collaboration technologies are still important to businesses, but that they’re focusing more on alternatives to the more expensive and complex hardware systems.
Established vendors like Cisco Systems, Polycom and LifeSize Communications are all moving to cloud-based offerings, while a growing number of smaller companies like Blue Jeans, Vidyo, Fuze and Zoom are getting traction in the market due to their cloud- and software-only solutions.
Blue Jeans’ Command Center includes a deployment dashboard that includes graphs and charts showing how often the service is being used, where the participants are globally, which features are being used, and which employees or departments most often use the service. In addition, real-time metrics track stats from live meetings, in-meeting tasks like recording or content sharing, and issues like jitter or packet loss.
In addition, the tool offers historical reports that can be filtered, with the option of exporting the data to Microsoft Excel or business intelligence solutions.