Chrome OS is gaining traction across all industries, especially education, with Google Cloud today highlighting the deployment of Chromebooks at Square. Known for its mobile-based payments reader, the company is offering Pixelbooks to new employees and piloting with the design team.

Square has 2,000 employees and trialed Chromebooks during a search for new devices. The company is already a big user of Chrome and the G Suite productivity apps, including Hangouts Meet. A pilot with “customer success workers” found the Google-made Pixelbook to be “the workers’ favorite.”

G Suite has been a critical part of the worldwide Square infrastructure for quite a while. With offices in several countries, we wouldn’t function collaboratively without Hangouts Meet; Chrome Browser is the most popular browser across the company.

The IT department was particularly fond of “containerized Chrome OS strengthened security” and how “setting up a Pixelbook takes about 70 percent less time.” This is due to the cloud-based nature and not needing to image drives. Meanwhile, the security advantage is especially important because Square deals with financial services.

There are no applications to install, so we can move away from that model of relying on hard drives; the Pixelbooks basically work right out of the box. Between the easy deployment and management through Chrome Enterprise as well as automatic updates, we save a lot of time that we can spend on more-impactful work.

As a result of the successful pilot, Square is now offering Pixelbooks to all new employees on several divisions, including recruiting. Going forward, Square is also contemplating “offering Pixelbooks to designers as an alternative to MacBooks.”

This is made possible by browser-based design tools like Figma. The app is similar to Google Drive in that projects can be accessed via a shared URL. For designers, Square notes the Pixelbook’s lightweight form factor, long battery life, and fast boot times “in comparison to other platforms, so designers can get to work immediately.”

Because Square’s design systems are not only used by designers but also by engineers, product managers, and marketers, building systems in Figma enables our teams to share designs openly across the organization, as well as across machines.

For Google, existing G Suite customers expanding its offerings to other products like Chrome OS is a big win. Chromebooks help the company offer a complete end-to-end solution for the enterprise, while more customers selecting the premium Pixelbook is a win for Made by Google.

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