Chromebooks prove their business mettle

Google announced Chromebooks just three months ago to both wildly positive and equally negative punditry. (Although I praised the Chomebooks, InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman panned them, as did InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister in his Test Center review.) But as I evaluate recent product announcements and business growth for Chromebooks, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Google has a winner with the Chromebook.

If you haven’t been following Chromebooks closely, you’d better start.

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Chromebooks are a disruptive innovation

I have previously countered ZDnet columnist Ed Bott’s claims that Chromebooks aren’t Windows killers. Here are of two key points I raised:

1. Google’s pricing strategy is a step toward IT as a service. By cutting the cost per notebook and business applications to approximately $35 per user per month, Google reduced the total cost of ownership to less than 20 percent of today’s cost of acquiring, maintaining, and supporting PC laptops via the IT infrastructure needed per knowledge worker.
2. All apps that some users need can run in a browser. Simply put, a Chromebook is not for every employee, but a majority of knowledge workers, specialized workers, and mobile users can adopt a Chromebook with little to no detriment to their workflow.

Google continues to make Chromebooks enterprise-ready

Google claims Chromebooks are designed to get better and faster over time through software updates. And it recently announced the availability of new features that support the claim of Chromebooks “getting better” over time.

For example, this week’s release of the Chrome OS that Chromebooks run on added VPN support and Secure Wi-Fi. With these two additions, businesses can assure that Chromebook users have protected access to their wireless networks and can restrict remote access to their internal network — virtually every business I know of wants that.

It was a little surprising that Chromebooks were targeted at businesses without support for Wi-Fi security at a minimum. VPN support would be a close second in basic requirements for a business seeking to use Chromebooks with mobile employees. Although they should have been in the initial release, it’s good that Google closed these two holes in just three months since first shipping Chromebooks.

Google also announced this week a tech preview of the previously promised Citrix Receiver for Chrome OS, which would address users who need to run existing applications not suited for a traditional browser — so that is getting closer to reality. I’m convinced that a Citrix client is more of a checkbox feature versus something Google truly expects to see broadly adopted. After all, the Citrix Receiver tech preview counts only 38 users on the Chrome Web Store. But with Citrix Receiver available on or promised for every mobile OS, Google needed to have it on Chrome OS to soothe worried IT managers’ fears, even if they don’t actually use it.

Chromebook customer traction is encouraging

Although the pace of feature additions to Chrome OS in encouraging, Google’s client references for Chromebook users are even more impressive.

For example, IT departments have to contend with the challenge of supporting branch locations. As Google rightly points out, onsite IT support at some branch locations can be expensive and impractical. It’s a real affirmation that Google now counts the likes of American Airlines, Ruby Tuesday, and Jason’s Deli as enterprise clients using Chromebooks to reduce the cost of IT at branch locations.

Another key target user group for Chromebooks is specialized workers. Virtually every business has a set of users whose IT needs don’t expand beyond email and access to intranet- and Web-based applications. These users are perfect trial groups for rolling out Chromebooks at your company. Salesforce.com, Groupon, Logitech, and Intercontinental Hotels Group are key enterprise clients using Chromebooks to meet the needs of these specialized workers.

Finally, Virgin America, National Geographic, the city of Orlando, and Konica Minolta are among reference clients distributing Chromebooks to mobile employees. I find it interesting that these organizations adopted Chromebooks for mobile users before VPN and secure Wi-Fi capabilities were added to Chrome OS.

Your organization could very likely find mobile users, specialized users, and branch office deployments that could benefit from Chromebook adoption. Considering the strong list of client references Google has already collected, what are you waiting for?

I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”

This article, “Despite critics, Chromebooks prove their business mettle,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Savio Rodrigues’s Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.