Google and Cisco forge unlikely alliance to enable enterprise collab on Chrome OS
In its latest push to drive the adoption of Chrome OS among business users, Google has partnered up with Cisco to provide enterprise-grade communications and collaboration capabilities on notebooks powered by its cloud-centric operating system.
At this week’s Enterprise Connect Conference in Orlando, Google enterprise products head Rajen Sheth and Cisco collaboration boss Rowan Trollope showed off a prototype version of WebEx that runs natively on the platform. The hosted video conferencing service has been integrated with Google Apps, which means that Chromebook owners can now join a WebEx meeting directly from Calendar and start a session by simply clicking phone numbers displayed in Contacts. Other components of Cisco’s Unified Communications (UC) portfolio are also bundled with the cloud suite, making it possible to send faxes and phone colleagues without having to open a new tab or reach for another device. That’s a major advantage for mobile workers, one the core target audiences for Chrome OS and the main focus of Cisco’s collaboration strategy.
Tropple wrote in a blog that the partnership between his firm and Google “makes a lot of sense. Think about it: Cisco – the leader in Unified Communications, and Google – the leader in productivity applications, combined can have a better solution than anyone else can provide.” With Chromebooks accounting for 21 percent of laptop sales in the United States, a figure that is only expected to rise in the coming years, it’s not hard to see why updating WebEx to support Chrome OS was such a non-brainer for Cisco.
The move also benefits Google, which is actively working to make the operating system more practical to use in enterprise environments with strict security and access control requirements. The web giant already offers a centralized management console that allows admins to enforce corporate policies, vet applications and modify user settings across thousands of Chromebooks at a time.
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