Verizon today unveiled new capabilities for its BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams. The enhancements are designed to provide better remote meetings for widely dispersed staff.
Verizon Business acquired BlueJeans Network, a cloud-based provider of video conferencing and event presentation services, about a year ago to provide a platform for video conferencing to compete with likes of Zoom and others.
Verizon is also now an early launch partner for Microsoft’s new Operator Connect platform, which creates a direct peering relationship between the Microsoft Teams platform and Verizon’s SIP trunking network.
The peering relationship is designed to enhance security while providing automation of provisioning and management in an end-to-end telephony solution. The new Microsoft Teams gateway enhancements include:
- Auto-join: Gateway-enabled room systems can now choose to automatically join Microsoft Teams meetings without the touch of any buttons.
- 1080p HD video support
- Video quality enhancements designed to reduce pixilation and improve video refresh rates
- Calendar Integration in the cloud
- Skype invitation parsing
- Spotlight support: This enables conference room participants to see the spotlighted participant on the room screen.
“The pandemic has intensified the need for organizations to have enterprise-grade collaboration solutions for their global workforces to stay connected and work more effectively from every possible environment,” said Sampath Sowmyanarayan, Verizon Business president of global enterprise, in a prepared statement. “These latest updates to our advanced communications portfolio, with the BlueJeans Gateway and Microsoft’s new Operator Connect platform, further simplify how enterprises can readily deploy solutions at-scale to streamline connectivity, extract the most value from existing investments, and future-proof collaboration infrastructure to meet the most pressing demands of the hybrid workplace.”
