TalkingHeadz is an interview format series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode, we check in with Raluca Monet of Google's Chrome Enterprise Recommended (CER) Team.
Chrome is a very popular internet browser, but there's more to than many realize. Chrome Enterprise offers organizations a number of advanced features. Chrome Enterprise Recommended recognizes solutions that leverage Chromebooks, Chrome Desks, and ChromeOS.
Chrome Enterprise offers a number of management and security features that can benefit a variety of use cases. There are several CER programs, and in this episode we dive into CER CCaaS.
Although Chrome can work with several premises-based solutions, the CCaaS sectors have embraced the browser over traditional software clients. Once the agent's desktop is on a browser, why bother with a full PC? Chromebooks are less expensive to purchase, secure, deploy, and maintain.
Raluca works directly with CXO level executives to improve profitability and create sustainable growth for corporations. Raluca’s areas of expertise include strategy formulation, organizational transformation, operational strategy, profit improvement and performance measurement. She joined Google in 2015.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode, we check in with Raluca Monet of Google's Chrome Enterprise Recommended (CER) Team.
Chrome is a very popular internet browser, but there's more to than many realize. Chrome Enterprise offers organizations a number of advanced features. Chrome Enterprise Recommended recognizes solutions that leverage Chromebooks, Chrome Desks, and ChromeOS.
Chrome Enterprise offers a number of management and security features that can benefit a variety of use cases. There are several CER programs, and in this episode we dive into CER CCaaS.
Although Chrome can work with several premises-based solutions, the CCaaS sectors have embraced the browser over traditional software clients. Once the agent's desktop is on a browser, why bother with a full PC? Chromebooks are less expensive to purchase, secure, deploy, and maintain.
Raluca works directly with CXO level executives to improve profitability and create sustainable growth for corporations. Raluca’s areas of expertise include strategy formulation, organizational transformation, operational strategy, profit improvement and performance measurement. She joined Google in 2015.
Welcome to talking to us today we'll be talking about room lookup on a of Google Chrome. But before that, Evan Happy New Year,
Evan Kirstel:Happy New Year, happy holidays, we're off to a brand new year
Dave Michels:now that 2022 is behind it. This is the problem. Everyone does their their year end post at the year end. And the year is not over yet. So now that we're in January, what was to you? The biggest story of 2022. For me,
Evan Kirstel:it was generative AI, aka Dolly, chat, GPT. and the like. I think the revolution is going to be so interesting, disruptive, whatever you want to call it, that we have no idea what to head.
Dave Michels:Well, you know, most people will say that a lot of this AI isn't all that useful and everything. But I saw you put a good use to it. I saw you doing a poem on social networks.
Evan Kirstel:I've been doing poems I've just released 18 blogs at once in four different languages. My SEO is through the roof. But in all seriousness, the quality of the prose of the writing, the humor, the intelligence, the punctuation, whatever metric you want to go into is extraordinary. And I don't think people realize the implication of all this. I'm just so astounded by what's happening with generative AI, as they call it.
Dave Michels:I don't know what to think. So I guess I'll have to ask the chat GPT for a conclusion on all this.
Evan Kirstel:Well, I've just finished a blog on this as we've been talking, and in about three seconds that will be published in 30 seconds. And I don't know you make a living out of ideas and writing. Do you see this as an opportunity as a threat as something else altogether?
Dave Michels:Well, I think it's very interesting. And there's certainly no denying that it's a breakthrough. And, you know, they, they often talk about how long it takes to get a million users or some like that. And, and I think Chad GPT did it in less than a week. And so it's very impressive technology, there's no question about it. And, and people are realizing, you know, the next generation of AI is actually coming because, you know, like Google's have this next generation of AI that one of their employees thought was sentient and got fired for it. But they haven't made it public. They haven't really shown it to people. And so this was this was an eye opening experience. You know, I always see the glass half empty, as you often point out. And I'm not that impressed because he writes well, but it makes up everything and just kind of, I had to do a biography on somebody that I was interested in. And they said that this person wrote this book, and it said, Well, I want to read that book. You know, and I'm looking for this book, right? It just made that up. He didn't write this book, you know, and the book had a great title and
Evan Kirstel:read my writing. It's completely made up. So I mean,
Dave Michels:that's the response is that, you know, there wasn't there was an article about Welcome to the future. It's all BS. But so as the President's you know, so, so yeah, it's a mirror of our own society. But I'm not as excited as Intel because a little more truthful, but whatever.
Evan Kirstel:Well, I mean, you're talking about writing, which is fair enough, but you know, there's also imaging there's also video creation, there's also music, and any form of coffee.
Dave Michels:And the best part of it the best part of chat GPT is it works on a Chromebook.
Evan Kirstel:Okay, that's the best part. While speaking of Chromebook, we have a guest that knows a thing or two about Chromebooks. So why don't we chat with her?
god:Let's get to talking. It is a semi monthly podcast with interviews of the top movers and shakers and enterprise communications and collaboration. Your host Dave Michaels and Evan Kirkstall, both of which offer extraordinary services including research, analysis and social media marketing. You can find them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or at talking points.com. That's points with the Z and Evan kersal.com. That's que ir S T E L.
Dave Michels:Today we have with us we're Luca mnay. The Global Partnerships lead for contact center the chromo esteem, welcome Raluca.
Raluca Monet:Thank you. Great to be here.
Dave Michels:So we want to start off quick question about your name. And we're Luca, as I recall, is a Romanian name but mo de is associated with France. So what kind of name is
Raluca Monet:I get this question a lot, actually. So a lot of people also ask me, Hey, are you related to the painter and I always say, Hey, if you ever watched me hold a brush or try and paint you immediately know that I am not related to Monet, but you're right or Luca is a Romanian name. I was born and raised in Romania. It's a very common name. They're
Evan Kirstel:very cool. And what kind of name is Dave Michaels? Anyway? So you've been at Google for seven years. That is that eternity in tech time. How is Google changed over that seven years? You know, working from home, for example, do you work from home at office? What's that journey been? Like? Yeah,
Raluca Monet:gosh, yeah, it's already been seven years. And just to be completely honest, it doesn't feel like that at all. It really went fast.
Dave Michels:It feels like 20 years or what?
Raluca Monet:No, it just feels like I just joined frankly, and you know, a lot of that has to do with just Google continue to feel very startup being on the inside and very fast pace. But in some ways, it's really the same company that I joined. And truly, that has a lot to do with the company's effort to preserve the awesome culture that sort of Google is known for. And one of the big reasons that I actually joined the company initially. So in some ways, it's the same company. And I'm grateful for that. And in some ways, it's continues to change and feel differently in some pockets. And again, it feels very startup still. And then Evan, I think you also asked me about, you know, working from home or in the office, just like a lot of tech companies sort of will embrace this hybrid model. Some folks have decided to just continue to work from home permanently. And they have applied for that. And some people continue to do a hybrid model of three plus two days. And it's working great. I actually traveled quite a bit. I spend a lot of my time with partners or customers. So you know, you'd find me out in the field a lot more time that probably in almost any office.
Dave Michels:Well, I want to get to your chrome partnership role. But before that, I want to I see that you spent 10 years at Unisys, what did you do at Unisys. And did that prepare you at all for your current role at Google?
Raluca Monet:It most definitely did Unisys the large IT integrator, right. So just as an organization led a lot of IT transformation projects for the government essentially, is the business unit I was in. And it's interesting how at some point during this journey at Unisys, we started seeing sort of Google the collaboration suite, becoming part of this IT transformation projects contract. So really interesting for me, I was part of three large deployments for what was back then known as you know, the organization going Google. So essentially deploying workspace for work at this three government agencies, doing the change management for it, and sort of leading this big, you know, transformational projects, that really did help me then make my next move, which is, hey, I was just so familiar with Google that it was sort of a very natural step to then, you know, come to Google and continue on this journey in the enterprise world.
Evan Kirstel:Fantastic. Let me ask you a bit about the history of Chrome, because I don't actually recall when Chrome came about, you can give us a little backstory there. I know. You know, multiple browsers have pretty deep roots. Even David Michael still uses Netscape. But where did Google make Chrome and Web?
Raluca Monet:Yeah, so Chrome was developed by Google and released in 2008, is a cross platform web browser. Chrome was initially a development project codename some people may not know that, and the CO thinking, you know, from being sort of this association between Chrome with fast cars and speed. And what's interesting is that Google kept the development project name as the final release name, the CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, initially opposed the development of another browser, right. He thought at the time, Google was too small to take on something significant of an effort. And he did not want to sort of compete with with the browsers at the time. But what's interesting to me is that after the co founders, Sergey and Larry hired several Mozilla Firefox developers, and the first demonstration of Chrome Schmidt said that it was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind. You know, that's what he said. So that's the story of the browser. And then Chrome OS came in 2009. The browser is the main component of Chrome OS. It serves as the platform for web application. And the goal for Chrome OS was to and continues to be to democratize computing, and specifically cloud computing to users around
Dave Michels:the globe. I vividly remember those browser wars the early when Chrome first came out, it was it was ie versus Chrome, and they were incompatible in a lot of ways. I guess. Chrome won the war because Microsoft are adopting chromium in Edge is the war over?
Raluca Monet:Well, so first of all, most of Chrome's source code comes from Google's free and open source software project chromium, but Chromium is proprietary. It continues to be free and it will remain free. Buddy's proprietary. Edge was built initially with Microsoft's own proprietary browser engine. Around 2018, I would say late 2018, it was announced that edge will be completely rebuilt as a chromium based browser. I personally not a big fan of this term of war, because it implies hostility. And really, each company was trying to build what they perceived as the best tool for browsing and accessing information on the web. So yes, it's true. Microsoft ultimately adopted the same chrome basis
Evan Kirstel:Chrome. Awesome. Well, Dave and I both have Chromebooks. I have a Samsung beautiful orange. cool device. I know Dave has like an Acer maybe HP with 4g? To tell us which vendors the best who's what's your favorite?
Raluca Monet:So I know these devices. Well, I have, then I still have the Samsung that I think that's such a beautiful, I believe that's the Galaxy right? Coral, beautiful color. Just such a sexy eyecatcher. But I also have, you know, an Acer and Asus and HP. They're all beautiful devices. And look, it's hard to say which vendor is the best? And I couldn't answer because we do work with all the major OEMs to offer a broad range of form factors. So you will see beautiful Chromebooks from Acer and Asus and Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, right everybody. And they come into just about any form factor you could imagine. From clamshells to you know, detachables touchscreens, not touchscreen. So just about anything you'd want to have, you can find a bail available from the major OEMs. But glad to hear that you use Chromebooks and that you love them.
Dave Michels:It's nice, I got to like Evan mentioned and I, you know, go between them depending which form factor I need. But one thing that really frustrates me with the Android ecosystem is that each manufacturer completely customizes it and the apps are different and the UI is different. Chrome OS doesn't have that it's much more consistent was was that deliberate design decision? Yeah, it
Raluca Monet:was. And I do have to defend my Android friends here. Because surely different OEMs. And manufacturers all implement their own version of Android, which is actually a good thing for differentiation purposes. With Chrome OS, as you correctly stated, while it's based on open source code, the OS image comes directly from Google, regardless of who builds the device. This means that there's universal consistency. So issuing things like bug fixes and security patches or pushing out content is dramatically simplified. And this consistency is key. And this is what I think you're referring to.
Evan Kirstel:Let me clarify something for me if you want. So there's Chrome browser, obviously. There's Chrome, mobile, there's Chromebooks. Like my Samsung, there's something called Chrome desk even I'm not sure what that is. So it's Chroma single thing? Are all of these different threads.
Raluca Monet:They're not different. They're all related, right? So Chrome browser is the foundation is how everything started. And from there, we've expanded into Chrome OS and Chrome devices, right? All of these are connected and related. And you can use them together, you can use them separately, depending on sort of what is the use case that you're looking for, you know, you can absolutely go into the full stack, and to end or you can just decide that, hey, I just want to use the browser, you know, whatever your sort of whatever the experience you're looking for, right is best for you.
Dave Michels:So there's the Chrome browser. And that's pretty much the first thing I install, and I get a new a new device. And it's free. So but you're not really, you know, you're associated with Chrome enterprise, which isn't free. So why would someone pay for Chrome enterprise when you can get Chrome for free?
Evan Kirstel:So Chrome
Raluca Monet:enterprise is also free. And I think you're referring to Chrome browser cloud management. So I'm glad you're bringing this up. Because you know, it can get a bit confusing. So this is an enterprise offering. That gives companies greater control over the browser experience for their employees. For example, a company may want to limit what extensions employees are, you know, putting on their browser, or they may want to limit the amount of data that can be copied and pasted from one tab to another for DLP reasons, because the browser is faster Among the enterprise desktop, because most things are SAS based, this type of controls are becoming increasingly more important. So that Chrome browser cloud management now, for Chromebooks, you can buy a chrome enterprise license, it's an upgrade. And similarly manage the entire endpoint computing device. So this goes beyond the browser right now. You can control peripherals provisioning deprovisioning, four, three enrollment, so someone doesn't just walk out with a device. So just to kind of summarize this two points, both the Chrome browser and Chrome OS have a cloud based web management console, that gives administrator the ability to push out policies, we have some 500. Plus configure policies to govern that end user experience, what devices can and cannot do what users of those devices can and cannot do, and what content should be displayed. And when it's particularly useful in ensuring updates and security fixes are published and applied to endpoints, regardless of where in the world they are located. So with one click of a button, all policies are delivered to every managed device and browser sort of,
Evan Kirstel:magically,
Dave Michels:is it a freemium model? Do people pay for parts of this?
Raluca Monet:It's not a freemium model. So the Chrome browser cloud management, it's a free product. This is the one that I mentioned first for managing your browser. And then the chrome enterprise upgrade license is its own standalone product. And you can buy that to actually manage the entire endpoint computing
Evan Kirstel:experience. Neat. So let me ask you about Microsoft Edge has chromium in it. So does that make it part of a chrome family you described? Or does chrome enterprise work with edge as well? Oh, I
Raluca Monet:like that notion that edge is part of the chrome family. We went from word to a family member. And I like this a lot better. I think what you're asking is, can you manage the Microsoft browser? With the chrome management interface? Yes. Yes. The answer is no, Microsoft has not permitted that level of API access. Yet. That sounds like my family.
Dave Michels:So now, let's get to the meat here. Chrome enterprise recommended, often known as Si, er, your baby, as I understand, several vendors, such as like Cisco, and RingCentral, are in the Chrome enterprise recommended program. What does that mean?
Raluca Monet:Yeah, so we started this program chrome enterprise recommended about two years ago. And really, we started this program with a goal of giving our enterprise customer customers peace of mind that sort of the third party software that they've purchased, that they've invested in, will continue working beautifully no matter what device they have. So if they, as they start diversifying their fleet or decide to go all in with Chrome OS, and buy Chromebooks, we wanted to make sure that they get a beautiful experience for their third party application. So what we do is we work with third party vendors, like the ones you mentioned, they've like Cisco, and RingCentral, and zoom, and many, many others. To make sure that one, the experience is beautiful that the solution performs greatly on a Chromebook. But we also work with these partners Well, beyond just ensuring compatibility, we actually work with these partners to optimize their solution for Chrome OS. So we align our technical resources to figure out where's the opportunity for us to innovate together and to bring something just truly unique and differentiated to our joint users. We have go to market efforts. We have roadmap discussions, we take their feedback and incorporate it in our own roadmaps. We do the same in the opposite direction. So it's a pretty in depth partnership that goes beyond simply, you know, giving a partner a badge that sort of approves or recommends their solution to the users. Got it. So
Evan Kirstel:who pays whom to be part of the chrome enterprise recommended? Vendor? You know, how does the C cast provider or other vendor become chrome enterprise recommended? So this is not
Raluca Monet:a paid program. Nobody pays everybody we are truly partners coming together to offer a great experience to our joint users. We are deliberately sort of limited if you will, you know how fast and how many partners we bring into the program. And we do that because we really want to maintain a really high bar of performance. We, ourselves, we use our own engineering team to test the solutions, put them through the wringer. And, you know, we identify any sort of issues potentially, we then work with a partner to address them. This is what we consider sort of value add, you know, amongst other things for our partners, so no money is being exchanged between us. It's truly a partnership for us to bring, you know, great solutions to market to our joint customers.
Dave Michels:Wow, I think a lot of vendors would say good partners pay, but Okay, that's interesting. I think I don't know how many car programs there are. But you can tell us that but I think see Kaz is the newest chrome enterprise recommended program. So how many programs are there?
Raluca Monet:Yeah, so there's only one chrome enterprise recommended program. So just wanting to provide that clarification. But within the program, we have different solution areas, seek as Contact Center is one of them one of the more recent ones. And within this program, we have 12 solutions. So 12 partners, all amazing companies. Beyond contact center, we have other solution areas like virtualization, security, productivity, communications, kiosk and signage. Right. So there's quite a bit of diversity here. I think in total, we have about 60 solutions targeting about eight key use cases.
Dave Michels:Wow, can a vendor be in more than one? Yep.
Raluca Monet:Yep, you can absolutely be more than one. And we do have partners who actually are, you know, in several?
Dave Michels:And are you personally involved in all the programs?
Raluca Monet:I am not, you know, I'm personally leading the partnerships in Contact Center, productivity, kiosk and signage, communications and printing, and then for virtualization and security and an upcoming one in healthcare. Those are partnerships that are led by people like me, you know, who are on the same team.
Dave Michels:So you're involved in the interesting, the better ones?
Raluca Monet:I know, we all I'm sure we all say the same things of our respective areas, because we do we do our you know, we're very passionate about them.
Dave Michels:And then last question on this, you just mentioned health care, other more car programs coming are done that car other more emphasis is coming or
Raluca Monet:outside of healthcare? We don't have anything else planned for launch in 2023. But you know, you just never know, I guess
Evan Kirstel:you do you never know. So, you know, Chrome is the end of the day, just a desktop or an endpoint. So what kinds of contact center problems can an endpoint really solve? I mean, security's that obvious and important one. Are there others?
Raluca Monet:Yeah. So our customers tell us that improving customer experience and providing high customer satisfaction is their highest priority. We hear that they want to reduce agent response time, right? How do you get agents to get to the right information faster. At the same time, they want to minimize their contact center costs by reducing deployment times and upgrades and agents, training costs. They also want to reduce agent turnover. We know contact centers are plagued with this issue. And that, you know, the agent jobs is difficult. And as a result, the attrition is high. And of course, they want to secure sensitive business and customer data. So when we looked at all of these, you know, aspects that you know, we've heard from customers, bringing Chromeless into a contact center was a no brainer. For us, Chromebooks, the rest of your business, because they are the most secure endpoint in the world. They improve your bottom line, because you don't need a 13 $1,400 device for agents, and provide a technology that truly enables agents to provide great customer support. And, you know, we can go into that later. But we really spent a lot of time figuring out how do we help our customers keep an eye on achieving the highest level of customer satisfaction and allowing us through our technology to handle the changing standards and demands of high security and agent productivity. So that's what we focused on.
Dave Michels:I want to push back here a little bit on that security point aren't all endpoints, you know, windows, Chrome, Mac, etc. More or less the same when it comes to security?
Raluca Monet:Absolutely not. You cannot buy a more inherently secure out of the box device and Chrome OS and I'm really glad you brought this up. Because it's a particularly strong point of Chrome OS and one of the key features customer side when choosing it When people buy Chrome OS is because of its inherent security posture. Whereas other platforms are implemented in spite of their security posture, no need to install antivirus or anything like that. It's just hardened right out of the box. It's a hardened platform out of the box. However, with other operating systems, there's an entire stack of third party antivirus software and libraries that need to be installed, updated and maintained. And it's because of this very reason that despite having shipped hundreds of millions of Chrome devices over the past 11 years, there has never been a single reported successful ransom attack carried out on a Chromebook ever,
Evan Kirstel:period. Wow, that's pretty impressive. Let's talk about, you know, beyond the basics of the browser, which, to us at user seems pretty simple. I imagine there's a lot of magic behind it. But can a browser work as an endpoint for a very complex contact center where you have real time voice, video, messaging, chat and other apps that are happening in real time?
Raluca Monet:Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, contact center selling into contact center, inserting customers into contact center has been and continues to be one of our most successful use cases, the web itself has come a really long way, providing a beautiful experience in the things we just mentioned, real time voice and video, chat, and sort of beautiful performance of these applications. That used to be sort of, you know, native apps and now have transitioned to the web. And we continue to help our partners move towards this modern web through progressive web apps. But maybe what I'd like to do is like, just take a minute to share where our focus is when it comes to contact center, because the opportunity for us was mostly around the improving agent experience, apart from sort of the security piece I mentioned. And also, another piece of this is sort of the ease of management. And, you know, the ease of deployment. As far as the agent productivity goes, you know, agents are far more than just folks answering calls, right, they are the face of an organization. And they can make or break customer loyalty with one negative interaction. So technology plays a much bigger role here than some may realize, from things like, you know, giving agents access to knowledge, a 200 agent, contact center loses about $1.5 million annually, from agents working across silos to find information. And we help with you know, in this area, a web based computing platform can substantially reduce, what do we call the cognitive load on the agent, right agents have quite a bit of information to handle in any given customer case. So an intuitive user interface is really important, as the agent sits there live right with a customer trying to navigate through all this information. A web based computing platform also provides fast and easy onboarding for new agents. So you know, you want your agents from the time you you know, you sign that offer to getting them productive, you want that time to go fast, you want to bring them up to speed, you want to onboard them as quickly as you can, and make them super productive. Also, the right computing platform should significantly reduce any device downtime with OS updates. So in fact, they shouldn't even know that such updates are being performed, it should all just happen. And then finally, the computing platform should be really well integrated with the entire stack, you know, up and down, we call the silicon to cloud to ensure you know, very seamless navigation to the entire software stack. So when you put all these things together, you know, for us the platform, you know, Chrome OS is actually just a truly differentiation tool for a contact center provider.
Evan Kirstel:Yeah, I've heard so many anecdotes through the pandemic of Chromebooks being just sent unmasked to agents at home and flipped on with a switch. Obviously, very low cost and simple way to deploy remote working for the agents. But so are Chromebooks a viable option for any browser based contact center? I mean, not just the certified program?
Raluca Monet:Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. So you know, when we bring partners into the program, it gives that extra you no assurance that we ourselves as a company, Google and chrome, have tested the solution and sort of are putting our sort of name behind it, but you made an important point. earlier about how easy is to deploy Chromebooks, and it is incredibly simple. And Romel enrollment is as easy as typing in your username and password. There's literally no installation of bulky software or antivirus and OS imaging, like you have to do with other operating systems. And in fact, you can actually dropship devices to the agent to just automatically enroll into enterprise management without any sort of it intervention at all, that device doesn't have to first go to a tech stop, like a physical location when somebody has to sit there and set it up. It's all done remotely. So you can actually serve any size of organization no matter where they are in the world, with just simply shipping this device and allowing the person to enroll into their enterprise management with the product that I mentioned earlier, the enterprise management upgrade.
Evan Kirstel:Wow, so simple. Even Dave, Dave Michaels could do it. It's impressive.
Raluca Monet:100% And Michael's to do.
Dave Michels:You're saying we're looking at if you could use a Chromebook with any Chromebook enterprise recommended contact center? Wait, there's more, you could do it with any web based contact center, whether they're in Chrome enterprise recommended or not, what about if they're not a browser based contact center?
Raluca Monet:Yeah, we have a lot of customers who they have their customer sort of experience function, right delivered not on the web, because they have some legacy applications, etc. And we have a lot of customers who, for this exact reason, use virtualization partners. So as part of our Chrome enterprise recommended program, we work with virtualization partners, like Citrix and VMware and KMail, to actually wrap that entire experience in a virtualized session, and provide a great experience to these customers who perhaps are sort of, you know, in the process of moving to the cloud, or have some legacy applications have not moved. But you know, we're still able to meet this customer's needs, even though they're not, they may not be fully SAS based.
Evan Kirstel:So let's talk about your sort of sales and marketing pitch. So if a C class customer pays for Chrome enterprise, instead of using the free chrome browser, what benefits do they get.
Raluca Monet:So they get an operating system that can play a significant role in not just improving agent experience, like I said, and security, but can be a critical differentiator for your business. You get stress free deployment, we talked about that a little bit earlier, you get cloud management, very easy way to get agent, user settings, policies, apps, and you get world class security, you get to protect your business, and customer information. I actually saw recently, an IDC report that really brought this home for me, because I have heard and talk to customer about these things many times. But what I read in IDC was just so fantastic to actually see the numbers. And what IDC found is that Chromeless brings your operation costs lower by 44%, while seeing 19%, higher agent productivity, and 33 reduction in ticket resolution time. These are amazing stats. When we first started doing this, our customers shared with us that because all the updates are happening in the background, and there's no agent time that they would save up to three hours per week in not having that downtime. Also, our devices boot really fast. And they deployed really fast about 76% Faster than Windows 10. And like we said, we you know, they can be managed remotely. So all of this amounts to a lot of really, you know, improvements and value and also should make any CFO very happy.
Dave Michels:No, are there any features that you've added to Chrome that are say specific to the contact center or any of your other tracks that matter? But let's talk about contact center. Yeah,
Raluca Monet:we're incredibly excited about the recently announced Chrome OS desk connector. That desk connector allows car contact center solutions to automatically create a new desk for each customer interaction, organizing all the apps and windows and tools that an agent needs with one within one the box. So what that does is one D clutters the screen for an agent. But also when the interaction ends the desk with all its case specific windows can be closed with one click versus manually clicking them one by one. And if you do the math of having 17 tabs for each customer interaction, right, that adds to a lot of clicks to open and close for each interaction but also many agents have two three customers concurrently. So that can be really, you know, amassed a lot of cluster are really fast. And you can probably relate to this right? On average, a user has about 17 tabs open at any given time, dozens of apps running at once, which can lead to lagging systems and all this unnecessary complexity for for agents, specifically, we were talking about contact center. So we knew that there was an opportunity to help streamline the approach. So we're thrilled to finally have that solution with chroma as disconnector.
Dave Michels:So with that feature, you're looking to increase that 44%.
Raluca Monet:That is correct. And 90% that productivity, we really expect the agents to be, you know, even more productive with desks.
Evan Kirstel:So who are all the vendors in the ERC cast program? And which one is really done the most integration? Would you say? Oh, wow,
Raluca Monet:you're gonna test my memory here. So we have let me see if I can kind of go through our contact center partners here, we have Cisco Dialpad, eight by eight edify five, nine, Genesis, nice RingCentral, talkdesk, ujet, Twilio and Vonage. And these are sort of the CCAFs. Providers wide. In addition to the virtualization partners that can work in conjunction with Asti who did
Evan Kirstel:not have an easier. That's true, shame them.
Raluca Monet:We're really, really proud of the partners that we have really just amazing leader in their space, and Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders and challengers, and we're just really privileged to be working with each one of them. We really have seen many, if not most of these partners leaning in to do integrations with us from a technical perspective. Some of them have worked with us on desk, some are continue are working with us on upcoming ones. Web hid is another one, you know, which allows sort of headset controls, especially valuable for sort of budgets again. So we really, I wouldn't want to pick just one because we've seen our partners really lean in into the work we're doing and come to the table to innovate with us.
Dave Michels:Can you give us a good example of how a CTS provider has actually improved or changed its solution with Chrome enterprise?
Raluca Monet:Yeah, so the way we improve the solution is right through through this connectors desk being sort of the first one out of the gate, there's additional ones in the works, I would say just as exciting. You know, for us, we always pay a lot of attention to what our customers are telling us and where's opportunity for improvement and we work with our seek as partners to bring those to fruition. I'm really excited to share that we've had such amazing feedback with really great customers. And if I could just perhaps pick one here. We've deployed 60,000 Chromebooks with JPMC. And initially, you know, the initial deployment was 43,000 Chromebooks. And what we heard from the VP of engineering, is that the deployment of this 43 cromoz was the most successful it deployment project ever, at JPMC. And like GPMC, we have other great customers. And we continue to look for ways to provide value and make this as easily as an experience as possible and provide as much value as possible. That's pretty
Evan Kirstel:impressive. I'm just doing some research here. Mainly Google searches. That's my research, I came across something called Chrome flex. What is that?
Raluca Monet:Yeah, I love cromoz. Flex cowboys, flex allows organizations to convert end of life Windows and Mac devices into full functioning Chromebooks. Not only does this save organizations a significant amount of CapEx, but it also contributes to E waste minimization and prolongs the device lifecycle. The reality is that many organizations that we go into, right will have devices laying around that they would still love to continue to use, although they move to cromoz. So now we have an answer for these devices, you simply, you know, put chromo ice on them. And they now have new life, which we love, because we're also as you know, as a company, just very big on being eco friendly. And you know, helping our customers be eco friendly themselves.
Evan Kirstel:Great. Dave has like a Windows 286 PC from the early 90s. I wonder if we could help them upgrade that. Good idea. Google, of course, also launched its own C casts. Imagine that's a different division. But did that complicate your messaging about the cause and go to Marketing, sort of being the neutral player in the space?
Raluca Monet:Yeah, that's a good question. Yes, this is a different business unit. It's part of our cloud organizations. And we are almost to sit, we are not almost, but we are two separate entities, the organization that I serve Chromeless is actually part of platforms and ecosystems. So, as a platform, our goal here is to, you know, make sure that our users have an amazing experience, no matter what product they use, whether they are first party or third party as a platform, it doesn't really matter to us because a platform is only as good as the applications that run on it. So because of where I sit in the organization, we view first and third party as neutral applications. And we really seek to provide, you know, that really optimized experience that the customer is looking for, regardless of the software they are running. We've had really good conversations with our car partners, when this product was launched. And we I think we're able to gain the trust of, of our partners that our interest is very much aligned with theirs. And then you know, the rubber met the road when we continue to see the investments that we're making in them and the efforts that we're taking in every day in and out to make their solution
Evan Kirstel:beautiful on Chrome.
Dave Michels:We got to wrap up a little bit, but I want to ask you, you mentioned in that Chrome flex question that Evan asked, you mentioned some environmental angles. We've talked a lot about, you know, cost security manageability. Is there much of an environmental angle to the Chrome story, because beyond chrome flex,
Raluca Monet:Oh, certainly. So and this is truly part of Google's greater mission, greater mission to be an eco friendly company. In general, I will say this Chromebooks are more eco friendly than the competition, consuming up to 46% less energy, which I think is amazing, right? Like, I would love to buy any appliance in my house, that promises that I could, I could say 46% less energy. In general, for Chrome OS, there is a significantly reduced load on the processor, which then means less power consumption, because they consume less power, their battery life tends to last longer. And I'm sure you know, being a Chromebook owner, you just love how much battery life you have everyday with your device. We've also designed them to be sustainable and repairable devices. And again, it's part of Google's larger, eco friendly mission. And we also work with our OEM partners to make sure that this mission extends into devices. So I'll just give you a quick example here. HP Elite is the world's first Chromebook made with ocean bound plastics, which is really exciting.
Evan Kirstel:That's really cool. I think so too.
Dave Michels:Well, I want to thank you for taking so much time with us today. It's a really interesting story around and it's amazing how you know, you're touching so much the areas that Evan and I cover. So great to hear this progress. It's really excited.
Raluca Monet:Well, it's been a pleasure to spend time with you both Evan and Dave today.
Evan Kirstel:Thank you. Well, it's great chatting with Raluca. It's so funny, you know, people are so more interesting than AI. It's really nice to talk to a human being at Google. And
Dave Michels:I was thinking, because of our earlier conversation, I was thinking about replacing you with chat GBT as a co host,
Evan Kirstel:I would welcome that opportunity. It'll be Evanescence service, you can just for one penny a call. You can just have it have it. Ping my API.
Dave Michels:What I find most interesting about what Raluca had said the thought that I had while she was talking is this is so obvious. Why are people still spending so much money on high end desktops just to run what they could run in a browser. I just don't get it.
Evan Kirstel:Well, I think the world is coming around to your point of view. So look forward to more discussions along these lines with Google and others. All right,
Dave Michels:till next episode. You may get into conversation with them I gotta get out of the phone. Don't don't read your phone. No, man. No, it's me.