Verizon says it will buy Blue Jeans Network, Zoom competitor, reportedly for under $500 million

U.S. telecommunications giant Verizon is today reported to be acquiring the videoconferencing company Blue Jeans Network in a transaction valued somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 million dollars.

Today @VerizonBusiness entered into an agreement to acquire cloud-based video conferencing and event platform @BlueJeansNet. More details here: https://t.co/iXhQC7FUoA pic.twitter.com/VorUSPzcwL

— Verizon News (@VerizonNews) April 16, 2020

Since the coronavirus pandemic struck the United States with full force about a month ago, the use of videoconferencing app Zoom has skyrocketed, but not without widely reported security and privacy issues, and a new word: "zoom-bombing," when malintents crash into your chat.

Verizon buying Blue Jeans? I don't know, but I can only think of bad things happening to a pretty good product that had advantages over its suddenly popular number one competitor.

More at the Wall Street Journal:

"Verizon Buys Zoom Conferencing Rival BlueJeans, Acquisition comes as the coronavirus spurs unprecedented work-from-home arrangements"

[via techmeme.com]

Observations from Twitter by reporters and others, below.

"Buy Zoom!"

"Ok but it would cost like $80B. That's 34% of our market cap."

"What?"

"OK BUY BLUEJEANS"https://t.co/oGhmVEElL4

— Jason InItTogether Lemkin (@jasonlk) April 16, 2020

In our work from home study we just completed, we surveyed a number of industries and companies large and small and could not find many BlueJeans users. https://t.co/FefURc7uMK

— Ben Bajarin (@BenBajarin) April 16, 2020

Gotta wonder: was this deal sealed ON BlueJeans? https://t.co/AmMAPMJ6nr

— Leslie Josephs (@lesliejosephs) April 16, 2020

I am super excited to lose signal 2-3 times during our weekly team meetings AND to get notifications about new @TechCrunch articles during video calls.