 Welcome to the Chrome Enterprise Technical Community Hour. Today, we'll be talking about Chrome OS Flex. My name is Rich, and I'll be your host for today's presentation. Joining me today, we have Peter Freudenberger, who's a customer engineer for Chrome Enterprise. Today's Chrome Enterprise Technical Community Hour is brought to you by the Chrome Enterprise Recommended Program, which is Google's partner program for third-party solutions that are optimized for Chrome OS or integrated with Chrome Browser. This webinar brings you the opportunity to engage with our team about new features and updates, enterprise development best practices, and our enterprise strategy. Now, without further ado, I'll hand it over to Peter and he'll kick us off. Thanks a lot, Rich. One moment. Share my screen here. Hey, can you see my screen OK, Rich? Yep. Awesome, thanks. Hey, everyone, as Rich said, I'm Peter Freudenberger. I am on the Chrome Enterprise team, and I help our customers all around the world deploy and use Chrome OS Flex to upgrade and supplement their Chrome OS fleets. So what I wanted to cover today were some basics of what Chrome OS Flex is, but then I really wanted to go into a little more depth on where we've seen Chrome OS Flex be successful. Chrome OS Flex has been available for about 18 months now, since it went stable in 2022. Now, we've had a ton of growth, a lot of customer success, so I wanted to share that with this group today. So broadly speaking, Chrome OS Flex is Google's way to turn any Mac or PC, that's any x86 device with an x86 CPU, into a Chrome OS device without needing to buy new hardware. And that is really an official Chrome OS offering. It's managed in the same way. Everything appears in the same cloud-based console. So once you've turned a device into a Chrome device with Flex, you really don't have to think about it being any different from any other Chrome book or Chrome box that your organization uses. Since we launched, we've seen approximately 172% Flex growth. And that's across a tremendous range of industries globally in our education business, but especially in our enterprise business as well. And the basic pitch is pretty simple. It's the same as the rest of Chrome OS. It's that you get a very high level of security. Devices don't need any kind of legacy on-prem management or any additional layers of management. Everything is managed via Google's cloud-based platform. It delivers a really great user experience that's fast and easy, has a modern look and feel. And of course, the unique value of Flex is you don't need to purchase new hardware to get all those benefits of the Chrome platform. Of course, one of the biggest selling points and one of the areas of our offering that we're always making improvements to is the management piece. And we're constantly adding, we have, I think, over 500 different policies so you can configure your devices to behave exactly how you want them to, whether that be as a kiosk, maybe a digital sign, or as a frontline worker device that people log into. It's all configurable through Google's browser-based console. You can get reporting, real-time alerting, really as much detail and granularity as you need, but also in an easy-to-use fashion. That's all available through the Google console, which is enabled with Flex and with all Chrome devices when you use a Chrome Enterprise Upgrade license. And then go into a little more detail on the unique part of Flex. It really is a very easy, a very cost-efficient way to upgrade existing hardware. One of the ironies of modern computer hardware is it's very well-designed. It lasts a long time, but it's actually the operating system that in a lot of cases slows it down and causes a device to be insecure over time. So Flex is really about taking Chrome OS, making it available on hardware up to 10 years of age. That, of course, has a host of benefits that come with it. From a sustainability perspective, it allows you to get more life out of existing machines without them ending up in the landfill or needing to be recycled at very high cost. As I mentioned, it has the same management approach. And Google does offer up to 10 years of formal support for any device that is converted with Chrome OS Flex. Devices actually receive updates forever, but from a support perspective, we stand behind Flex devices for up to 10 years. There's really three ways to think about whether an organization might be a good fit for Chrome OS Flex. One is perhaps it's a Windows shop, and they just want to evaluate what Chrome OS is. Flex is free. All you need is the management license, which is an annual license, and you can get a free trial of that for up to 50 devices. So it's a really great way to introduce customers to Chrome OS in a low cost or an entirely free way. Of course, as I mentioned, it's a great way to reduce e-waste, extend the life of existing devices, which of course with it brings tremendous cost savings. And it's a way to get rid of on-prem infrastructure entirely. And as we see organizations move more and more towards a hybrid model, where not all users are always on site, or maybe there aren't even offices anymore, and especially with larger organizations that are distributed very broadly across the world, having a cloud-first OS that was built for the cloud by Google runs on Google's infrastructure, and you can manage any device from anywhere, that's really powerful as well, and another great reason to consider converting devices with Chrome OS Flex. So I wanted to go into a little more depth today, since we launched in July of 2022, of some of the really big successes we've seen with Chrome OS Flex in the market. Just to give a little background, broadly speaking, there's five major ways that we've seen Flex deployed at scale globally. One is for hybrid remote workers, folks that aren't always on a campus or in a facility that's corporate owned all the time. As a thin client, that's a really great way to have a very low cost, extremely secure thin client. If you're connecting into some sort of VMware or Citrix infrastructure, you just really don't need an OS as complex and difficult to secure as Windows when you're just accessing remote resources anyway. Another area where we've seen a ton of traction is with Contact Center. Again, very cost-sensitive, large volumes of users, oftentimes overseas, it's a great fit for Chrome OS and for Flex too. And then digital signage and kiosk have been very, very popular, because again, when reliability, uptime, ease of management, simplicity of user interface are all very, very paramount for digital signage and kiosk use cases, we've seen tremendous uptake of Flex in those use cases as well. And I'll go into a little more detail with some customer examples in a minute. So to go into a little more depth, one area where we've seen is one of the world's largest furniture and lifestyle retailers. They had this challenge of thousands and thousands of in-store customer-facing kiosks all around the world that all they're doing is running a progressive web application. And there was really no need and it was causing them a lot of problems to have the complexity of Windows for delivering just a web application in a full-screen, can't escape kiosk kind of mode. And of course, being a major retailer, their priorities were always having a high level of uptime being able to have visibility into what devices are doing since there aren't necessarily dedicated on-site in-store staff. And this is operating in about 35 countries. So it was a tremendous global scale to what this retailer wanted to do. So what their solution was was twofold. One was taking their Windows kiosks, converting those with Chrome OS Flex, and rolling those into the Google console and delivering their progressive web app that way. And they also ended up buying a new specialty, very custom-made for retail environment hardware from HP, also running Chrome OS Flex, so that they could have newer hardware, kind of a regular refresh and have Chrome OS Flex on these devices right out of the box. And there are over 10,000 of these devices in production today all over the world, and the project has been a huge success. Another area where we've seen a ton of traction and a lot of interest in Chrome OS Flex and a lot of growth has been in healthcare. And again, uptime is paramount. Cost savings is always a concern, and the technical requirements are that devices just work, and when they don't work for clinicians, then the consequences are very severe. So it's a whole industry that's very focused on stability and cost savings. So what a very large partner of ours in New Jersey did has dozens of hospitals and healthcare facilities, is they had a lot of aging, HP and Dell hardware, a lot of thin clients. They converted that fleet to Flex from, it was running, I believe, Windows Embedded, and that's delivered greater uptime, more visibility. And one of the unique things they did, and I'll get into this a little more in detail later, is they deployed Flex over the network. So they actually pushed Chrome OS Flex over the network without a human needing to touch them with a USB stick or something like that. So they were able to deploy these devices in the tail end of the pandemic very quickly and very efficiently. And similarly, we have a number of large manufacturing partners who need very secure, very stable kiosk and frontline worker type of devices for their factory floors. And this is an organization that operates on a global scale with very different procurement patterns in different parts of the world. So there were actually 180 different types of PCs, thin clients, two years old, 10 years old in use in their factories all over the world. They didn't have much of a hardware procurement strategy. So they had this incredible challenge of maintaining Windows images for this huge diversity of hardware. Chrome OS Flex, it's a single OS image for absolutely everything, for all of the hardware that Flex supports. So this organization was able to deploy to that huge diversity, unify it all under one management platform. And it was a tremendously successful product and a solution for them. That's really helped them take away a lot of the complexity of managing a multi-thousand device global deployment in their factories. Similarly, a lot of large banks, retail banks, global financial institutions have challenges of managing devices even before the pandemic. And now that many staff are remote or hybrid, that becomes even harder in a Windows world. So right in the middle of the pandemic, one of the world's largest retail banks started rolling out 13,000 devices for their work from home staff who became newly work from home. And it was a very simple configuration that we call managed guest mode. Usually don't directly log into the machines. All they're doing is using a curated selection of URLs and Chrome applications. And it was basically just getting them into their VDI environment. And that's something that PromoS is great for because you can configure it remotely via the cloud just to launch a specific set of links or applications or URLs. And it provides a very secure, high confidence environment for the type of staff who are handling customer data, sensitive financial data on a regular basis. And that program was incredibly successful and was at its peak on 13,000 devices in about 25 countries all around the world. To wrap up, we've got another great example here of about a 250,000 employee global physical security organization. So folks who have armored trucks, they guard banks, they guard military facilities. And they have huge numbers of staff that have fairly simple IT needs. So data entry of various kinds, time sheets, spreadsheets. And again, they had acquired a huge range of different hardware over the years. So they had this challenge of a huge level of diversity with the traditional Windows Active Directory on-prem infrastructure. And by converting all those devices to Chrome OS Flex, they're able to unify all of that complexity in more than 90 countries and now have one pane of glass, one management platform, everything in the cloud, managed very centrally by a small team in the UK. And that took a tremendous amount of complexity out of their IT strategy and made their entire IT environment a huge amount more reliable. And then finally, I mentioned digital signage. It's a great use case for Chrome OS Flex. And it's one of the areas we're seeing a lot of deployments and a lot of traction. Again, it's those classic themes of cost, uptime and ease of management that the Chrome OS platform delivers and Flex allows it to be delivered on any hardware of choice. In this case, we work with one of our partners who specializes in digital signage. They had hardware from a specialty manufacturer that they were very interested in using. It's designed to be more rugged than the typical Chrome box or a little PC. So they used the hardware they wanted that was perfect for being in a kitchen, kind of hot, dirty environment. They installed Flex on all the devices in their warehouse and then as part of a hang and bang type of arrangement going out into stores, hanging new displays, they deployed their Chrome OS Flex devices to thousands of chicken chain restaurants all around Australia. And that's been a very, very successful project that's now expanding. So I know we kind of covered a lot of ground fairly quickly, but wanted to give some examples of how Chrome OS Flex has been used in the field over the past 18 months and how we see it continuing to expand in different use cases and different industries all over the world. So I wanted to just briefly touch on where there are opportunities to monetize Chrome OS Flex as a partner. A lot of our projects, probably the majority of what I just ran through is delivered in some way with the help of a partner. This is a very easy to use platform, but when you're rolling out tens of thousands of devices, a lot of end customers, a lot of organizations could really use some additional help. And so the way that our partners tend to become involved is in a number of different ways. When we're talking about Chrome OS Flex being retrofitted onto existing PCs and Macs running Windows or Linux or Mac OS, a lot of times our partners provide a lot of value in the proof of concept and experimentation phase. That Chrome OS in enterprise is still very young, so we really lean on our partners to provide that expertise and get customers rolling with what Chrome OS is, helping set up the enterprise upgrades, Google Admin console, and then walking folks through how to configure everything, how to set up OUs. All of that is a tremendous opportunity for partners to deliver a ton of value. And Google of course has a number of partner support programs to help fund that kind of work as well. And then not just with retrofitting old hardware, but with new hardware as well. There's a ton of partner opportunities, whether that's helping an end customer find the right hardware that can run Chrome OS Flex. And we have what we call our certified devices program where we add continuously new hardware to our list of supported Flex devices, whether it's imaging at the warehouse, factory, enrolling devices so that they're present in the Google Admin console when the end customer gets them out of the box. Life cycle management, knowing what to replace and when. Those are also a range of tremendous opportunities for partners to provide a lot of value. So if you're in the integrated business or the partnerships or the reseller business, I'd encourage you to think about Chrome OS Flex as a great option when we'd be really excited to have a conversation about how you can use it as part of your business, providing services to end customers. In terms of the technical piece, I didn't want to go into too much depth, but I wanted to outline, Chrome OS Flex can be deployed in a couple of broad ways. Probably the easiest and simplest thing that a lot of our customers do, especially at small scales, is you just put Flex on a USB stick. You don't need any licensing to do that. It's totally free. It takes about five minutes to install Flex on older hardware, maybe 60 seconds on newer hardware. It's very simple. There's like two prompts that need to be clicked. It's extremely easy to do. And then at scale, in large corporate networks, when we're talking thousands or tens of thousands of Flex devices, deploying Flex over the network via tools like Microsoft SCCM or Microsoft WES is a popular way to deploy Flex. And Google can, of course, provide guidance either to partners or to end customers of what approaches most appropriate and most efficient for a customer's set of needs. I hope this has been an interesting overview of Chrome OS Flex and some of the ways that it's been used in the field over the past year. At ChromeOSpartnertraining.com, we have a tremendous amount of resources that go into a lot more detail of when to use Flex, how to use Flex, different use cases for it. So I'd really encourage everyone to check out that partner training portal. And there's ways from within that portal to get indirect touch with Google for more direct support and more in-depth conversations as well. And with that, I'll hand it back over to Rich. I really appreciate you taking the time to check this out today. Thank you. Thanks, Peter. I think we got one more slide. Can you advance to the next one? There we go. So in closing, please visit the Chrome Enterprise developer website for additional information to supplement your learning. That concludes today's presentation. We look forward to seeing you at the next webinar. Thanks for joining and have a great day. Thanks, everyone.