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Blue Jeans Networks announced this week that it raised some serious funds to expand its sales and marketing operations to the tune of $25 million.

The interoperable video conferencing company is celebrating one year in the industry with the Series C funding, of which was led by New Enterprise Associates and included Accel Partners (News - Alert) and Norwest Venture Partners. The three venture capital firms are previous investors in the company. To date, Blue Jeans networks has raised $48.5 million.

"In a year, we've gone from unknown to disrupter," Stu Aaron, Blue Jeans' chief commercial officer, told CRN. "We're growing our paying customer base day in and day out, and we're happy to have gotten to a year."

"Most of our growth has been through word-of-mouth," Aaron said. "We haven't put much investment into marketing programs, so we're going to start to put dollars into awareness of the product. As you'd expect, the biggest obstacle we run into is people who don't know we exist."

Blue Jeans' ever-expanding list of customers contains small and large companies alike. Some recent additions include Facebook (News - Alert), Gawker Media, Match.com, NYSARC, Orchard Brands, Stanford University, and the Sierra Club.

A new tool announced today, along with the company’s funding, is the addition of Web Browser access to the Blue Jeans service. With this functionality, Blue Jeans is extending video conferencing to the Web by bringing the browser directly into the video conferencing landscape. The new browser access option, currently available in beta, allows participants to connect to a Blue Jeans meeting with nothing more than their Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari browser and a camera.

Blue Jeans is also expanding interoperability to include more commercial clients, with added support for Cisco (News - Alert) Jabber, Cisco TelePresence Systems and native SIP support.

"With all of these new capabilities, Blue Jeans is raising the bar in video conferencing services," said Andrew W. Davis, senior partner at Wainhouse (News - Alert) Research. "Blue Jeans first brought cloud, interoperability, and mobility together into an easy meet-me service that was disruptive to the video conferencing status quo. Now, the industry as a whole is taking notice and, with the addition of browser access, the company is showing how video conferencing may finally become the ubiquitous tool we've long anticipated."

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

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