Google makes it easier for businesses to set up new phones for their employees

Google is launching a new way for businesses to give new phones to their employees: zero-touch enrollment.

Traditionally, when you want to give a new phone to an enterprise user, chances are some poor admin has to deal with ensuring that the device is configured correctly and that all the right policies are in place. As the name implies, the new zero-touch enrollment feature, however, takes all of these manual steps out of the process.

The idea here is that employees can use a device out of the box, because all the management services and setting are already ready to go when the device is shipped.

This means the user only has to sign in, walk through the setup process and start working, and admins don’t have to do any additional work to authorize these devices and add them to their mobility services. They simply assign the new device to a user and the device will be automatically enrolled with their existing enterprise mobility management solution like VMware’s AirWatch when it’s powered on.

For now, this only works with Google’s own Pixel phone on Verizon’s network (standard disclaimer: Verizon owns Oath, which is the mashup of the old AOL and Yahoo and which in turn owns TechCrunch), though the plan is to expand this far beyond this first partnership. Google says it’s working with Samsung, Huawei, Sony, LG Electronics, HMD Global Oy Home of Nokia Phones, BlackBerry, HTC, Motorola, Honeywell, Zebra and Sonim on the device side (with more partners in the pipeline). In the U.S., AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile will also soon support this service. In Europe, the company is partnering with BT and Deutsche Telekom and in the Asia-Pacific market with Softbank and Telstra.