Citrix Demonstrates Its Support For Google Chrome OS

Google’s Chrome Operating System is not yet ready for prime time on notebook computers but the company has landed corporate remote access specialist Citrix Systems as a partner.

Google said, at an update event, that consumers would be able to purchase netbooks based on its Web operating system, which lets users run Web apps in the Chrome browser, from Samsung and Acer in mid-2011. The system was expected before the end of this year but concerns about bugs, performance tuning, and connecting digital cameras to the mix have combined to delay the arrival of Chrome OS.

Heads Appearing Above The Parapet

While most enterprises would not dare to embrace such a nascent offering, Citrix has stepped forward to announce plans to use Chrome OS to support Citrix Receiver, a software client for application and desktop virtualisation, next year.

The promise is that Citrix customers will be able to use Chrome OS netbooks into their office and get immediate access to their enterprise apps through Receiver.

Gordon Payne, senior vice president of Citrix Systems, demonstrated Citrix Receiver running Microsoft Excel on Chrome OS, with the document actually hosted in the company’s data centre. He also showed off a Solid Works CAD app and Hyperion business intelligence app running the same way.

Touting Citrix’s long track record of helping users shuttle business apps from their PCs to corporate data centres and running them on different computers inside and outside the central office, Payne said Chrome OS lends itself nicely to Citrix’s service delivery model.

“With that centralisation and delivery of enterprise and business apps as a service, this is a natural partnership with Chrome OS and Chrome notebooks,” Payne said.

While the endorsement of such a fledgling product and an unproven computer paradigm should be enough to make Google executives blush, it’s Citrix’s installed base of 250,000 global customers that should warm hearts. This includes banks, retail and hospitals ranging from dozens to hundreds of thousands of workers, all prime targets for Chrome OS as it seeks to challenge the Microsoft Windows PC hegemony.

One solid enterprise player alone is not enough to put Chrome OS on the map in a PC-centric world, but it is certainly a conversation starter.

Couple that with the dozen-plus Chrome OS pilot partners – including the US Department of Defense, Kraft, American Airlines and Virgin – who agreed to test the unbranded Cr-48 netbook Google is offering, and it is clear the company is doing quite a bit to secure interest in the corporate sector. Will the businesses come?

“The level of partnership that Google has been able to muster up is quite impressive,” Al Hilwa, an IDC analyst,  told eWEEK. “It is certainly the case that evolutionary technologies stand a much bigger chance of being adopted than revolutionary ones, and being able to run traditional apps designed for other platforms, such as Windows, is a clever way to roll out Chrome OS.”