With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, there was a mass rush of organizations toward using remote tools, notably including video conferencing tools.

Not all video conferencing tools did benefit, and now one of them is shutting down. BlueJeans, which was acquired by telecom giant Verizon for $400 million in 2020, is on the way out.

BlueJeans was founded in 2009, two years before rival Zoom got off the ground. Zoom is still alive and well, while BlueJeans is not. Cisco's WebEx, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams also continue to operate, leading to a very competitive marketplace for video conferencing in 2023 and beyond.

The shutdown of BlueJeans is not immediate, but rather will follow a multiphase sunsetting approach. The first phase comes into effect on Aug. 31 with the discontinuation of the BlueJeans Basic tier and free trial offers. The rest of the platform is set to be shut down in 2024.

The move comes as Verizon doubles-down on its core areas of focus, which include 5G, wireless, cloud and networking.

There are many potential reasons as to why Verizon's efforts with BlueJeans ended in failure. Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst, Amalgam Insights, told SDxCentral that he had high hopes for the acquisition when it was first announced.

"When Verizon acquired BlueJeans in 2020, it was expected that Verizon was going to make BlueJeans a ubiquitous offering," Park said.

As a ubiquitous offering it could have been an add-on for calling plans or for internet service, or serve as a foundational technology for online events, as BlueJeans was well suited to support video at scale. Park noted that BlueJeans could have even been part of the mobile offerings to go along with unlimited talk and text plans as a default Verizon service.

"Verizon failed to take advantage of its massive scale, millions of subscribers, vast go-to-market reach, and variety of consumer and business offerings to sell BlueJeans," Park said.

In Park's view, it seems that after the acquisition, BlueJeans became an afterthought: not big enough to push the needle on overall Verizon revenue and lacking an executive sponsor with the vision and ambition to make BlueJeans into a powerhouse on the scale of Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

"This acquisition is ultimately yet another proof point that carriers struggle to provide and sell end-user services other than pushing bandwidth through a network," Park said. "It's not that service providers lack distribution, customer touch points or business synergy; they just lack the attention span to build a business model on anything that isn't bandwidth."