Google LLC said today that it has teamed up with several major technology companies to form a new industry group called the “Modern Computing Alliance” that will try to tackle joint problems around issues such as remote work, performance and security.

The other members of the alliance are Box Inc., Citrix Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., Okta Inc., RingCentral Inc,. Slack Technologies Inc., VMware Inc. and Zoom Video Communications Inc.

The Modern Computing Alliance said its overriding goal is “drive silicon-to-cloud innovation for the benefit of enterprise customers – fueling a differentiated modern computing platform and providing additional choice for integrated business solutions.”

Google doesn’t mention one of the group’s core purposes, however, which appears to be to try and encourage more enterprises to adopt its Google Chrome operating system and browser.

In a blog post, Chrome OS Vice President John Solomon the Modern Computing Alliance will try to pool its knowledge and resources to solve shared problems around how enterprises do work in the cloud, and the tools they use to do this. Many of the problems can be solved by developing new standards and interoperable technologies that can be used by any company that relies on one of the partners’ platforms or products, he said.

For example, the alliance will focus on developing new standards and interoperable technologies that can be used by any company that relies on one of the partners’ platforms or products. One specific example involves using Intel’s accelerators to evaluate workloads and handle things such as conferencing more efficiently, Solomon said.

Another area of interest is progressive web apps, which help to enable an integrated, secure experience on any device, from any location. Google said it’s committed to improving the quality of video and audio experiences in native PWAs by leveraging MCA partners’ hardware-based capabilities and platform optimizations, in order to create better performance for users.

“The technology industry is moving toward an open, heterogeneous ecosystem that allows freedom of choice while integrating across the stack,” Solomon wrote. “This reality presents both a challenge and an opportunity.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said the Modern Computing Alliance has a decent mix of software, infrastructure and hardware vendor participants that will help to define Chrome, Chrome OS and Google Workspace’s future standards. “The name alludes to much grander ambitions but this appear to be the scope for now,” Mueller said.

He added that the alliance is good news for enterprises as whatever it comes up with should allow them to operate more seamlessly across different products and platforms, helping them to be more agile and increase velocity, ultimately speeding up enterprise acceleration. “But announcing cross-vendor initiatives is easy, delivering on them is magnitudes harder, so we will have to wait and see how its first deliverables changing the future of work for enterprise users,” Mueller said.

Google and the Modern Computing Alliance have promised to share some “early innovations” during the first half of 2021.

Image: Google