The education sector has quietly been experiencing a surge in the use of Chrome OS over the past few years, fueled largely in part by the low price of many Chromebooks. But for those school districts and enterprises that couldn't afford to equip their entire computer stock with brand new Chromebooks, New York-based start-up called Neverware offered an enticing solution. Through CloudReady, the company has been resurrecting older hardware by installing Chrome OS onto them. Now, the company has announced that they are receiving funding from Google, at least initially, to expand their focus into the enterprise market.
CloudReady can be installed on a plethora of existing Windows PCs or Macs, with many models even supporting a dual boot system. In our own experience, installing Chrome OS through CloudReady breathed new life into a laggy, cheap Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 that was bought on Amazon. It might not offer all of the bells and whistles of Windows, but for the average person, Google's suite of education and business software is more than enough to cover your bases.
While CloudReady is free for installation for personal use, it does cost money to deploy CloudReady on a wider scale. But CloudReady makes it more cost-effective to utilize their services as it ends up reducing the total cost of managing devices while keeping the software intact and equally as secure. Moreover, for all of the organizations using CloudReady, access to Chrome Enterprise integration is readily available through Google's cloud-based Admin Console, making remote management easier.
Ever since CloudReady's launch in 2015, more than a thousand school districts across more than 20 countries around the world have been using Neverware's services to convert aging hardware into functioning Chromebooks.
As Neverware estimates its Series B funding round to close by the end of the year, Andrew Bauer, the CEO of Neverware, states that "our Series B will be the first step of our expansion into the enterprise. With continuous support and endorsement from Google and other investors, we're confident in our ability to bring to market an operating system specifically designed for organizations entering the era of cloud computing."
Have you installed Chrome OS via CloudReady before? What are your thoughts on Neverware's product? Let us know below!