Airtel on Tuesday announced a partnership with US-based telecom giant Verizon. As a part of this partnership Verizon is bringing its BlueJeans video-conferencing solution in India. Airtel BlueJeans, as the newly launched video-conferencing solution is called, it is available only to the enterprises. This is quite similar to video-conferencing platforms such as Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Teams that are available only to businesses.
As far as from the features are concerned, Airtel BlueJeans comes with a host of features that make it make an ideal for the enterprises. For starters, it can accommodate up to 50,000 attendees in a single meeting. Another defining feature of Airtel BlueJeans is its focus on end-user privacy. Airtel says that all of the data from this service would be hosted locally in data centres located across the country, which would make the platform safe and secure for end-users.
Another defining feature of Airtel BlueJeans is its Smart Meeting feature. Airtel says that this feature captures the most important discussion points, assigning action items, and catching-up quickly with time-saving highlight reels.
In addition to this, Airtel BlueJeans has a host of features for the end-users, which includes HD video, Dolby audio, waiting rooms, AES-256 GCM level encryption, restricted meetings with two-step authentication, screen-sharing feature and integrated workflows with Microsoft Teams, Workplace by Facebook, Office 365, Google Calendar, Slack, Splunk and Trello among others.
In terms of the pricing, Airtel BlueJeans will be available for free to businesses in India for the first 3 months following which it would offer a 3 tier pricing strategy for the large enterprises, medium enterprises and small businesses for which the service would be bundled with existing plans. The company hasn’t revealed the exact pricing yet.
As far as Airtel’s partnership with companies like Cisco and Zoom is concerned, the company says that it would be continue to work with its other partners to offer WebEx, Zoom and others as a part of its existing plans.
It is worth noting that the development comes shortly after Reliance Jio launched JioMeet in India. However, JioMeet, unlike Airtel BlueJeans is also available for non-enterprise customers. It also comes at a time when Zoom is continuing to gain popularity among the people, both enterprise customers and others. “We know that we’re not the first out there. We know that there are others out there but we have some very strong differentiating points,” Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti said while interacting with the media.
