When it comes to the corporate end-user computing experience, the landscape is currently in a state of transformation in terms of the devices that employees can use to do their jobs and the manner in which they use those devices to access business applications. In order to garner more insight into these trends, ESG recently surveyed 395 IT professionals responsible for overseeing the endpoint device, application, and mobile computing strategy for their organization. A critical focus of the research included specific endpoint device trends, such as bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies and their effect on the entrenched end-user computing ecosystem, namely Windows-based desktop and laptop PCs.

One of the areas of examination involved organizations’ openness to Google Chromebook and its potential to disrupt the aforementioned old guard approach. As seen in Figure 1, more than two-thirds of respondents expect that Google Chromebooks will impact their organization’s existing Windows-based endpoint device footprint, whether to a significant (38%) or minor (32%) extent. At the other end of the spectrum, less than one-quarter of organizations report having absolutely no plans to provide their employees with Chromebooks. 

In an effort to further profile those organizations with a greater affinity toward Chromebook, ESG segmented the respondents according to the amount of time their organization has been in existence (i.e., age of the organization). Given their proclivity for being at the forefront of technology trends like cloud computing¹ and BYOD,² it is not surprising that younger organizations are considerably more bullish on their Google Chromebook outlook. Specifically, those organizations that have been operating for ten years or less are more than twice as likely as those that have been around for more than 20 years (56% versus 24%) to believe that Chromebooks will have a significant impact on their Windows-based endpoint device footprint (see Table 1). In addition to the previous observations about the technology tendencies of these younger organizations, it is worth pointing out that the Windows-based endpoint device profile of these organizations is likely much smaller from the outset than their more established counterparts that have been in business since the PC revolution of the 1980s. For their part, 41% of organizations that have been in existence for more than 20 years have no plans to provide Chromebooks to their employees, compared with only 9% of those organizations born in the digital age.

¹Source: ESG Research Report, 2015 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2015.

²Source: ESG Brief, BYOD: Increased Investment Leads to Increased Productivity, May 2015.

FIGURE 1. Plans with Regards to Providing Employees with Google Chromebooks

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2016