Samsung, Red Hat Team Up For Enterprise Mobility Push

Samsung Electronics America and Red Hat have teamed up to deliver mobile solutions for the enterprise market.

This new strategic alliance follows a similar partnership between Apple and IBM back in July last year. That deal saw the iPad maker and Big Blue team up to bring IBM’s cloud, analytics and mobile management services to the iOS environment, and to supply customers with iPhones and iPads running industry-specific applications.

Mobile Alliance

Both Samsung and Red Hat have touted the respective strengths they can bring to the table, but it should be noted that this alliance is initially only focused on the US.

On the Samsung side, the alliance will benefit from Samsung’s mobile device portfolio. This will be combined with Red Hat’s open source middleware, mobile and cloud technologies “to deliver mobile solutions that enable rapid development and integration of enterprise applications for organisations moving toward a mobile-first strategy.”

The alliance between Samsung and Red Hat comes as mobility becomes an increasingly important priority for many businesses. Going forward, the next generation of mobile business solutions are expected to be increasingly open, and yet still provide access to critical business information while maintaining robust security.

“Effective and successful enterprise mobility strategies take into account both platforms and devices, and how they come together to help enable powerful end-to-end mobile solutions,” said Craig Muzilla, senior VP of the Application Platforms Business at Red Hat.

“We are excited to collaborate with Red Hat to deliver the next generation of mobile enterprise applications and solutions, and are committed to shaping the future of innovation,” said Robin Bienfait, executive VP and chief enterprise innovation officer at Samsung.

“Samsung firmly believes that strategic alliances with organisations such as Red Hat that deliver open source enterprise infrastructure and provide reliable, secure integration from the back end to the end user will help businesses more readily adopt a mobile first environment,” said Bienfait.

The partnership is expected to deliver a number of solutions for the enterprise.

The first deliverable will be a set of mobile business applications that will run on the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform. The mobile apps will run on Android, but the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform allows for “other operating environments” as well as enterprise back-end system integration.

The mobile applications will target business intelligence, field and customer service, inventory management and sales catalogue, pricing, ordering, and invoicing. The two firms say these applications can be customised and tailored to fit the unique needs of a particular organisation.

The second deliverable from the partnership is a developer ecosystem. Both firms say they will contribute tools and resources to build and nurture a new ecosystem of enterprise partners and developers.

The third deliverable will be robust support services, which will offer customers and partners integrated support, as well as the Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), and global delivery and support services for the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform.

And the final deliverable is business collaboration. Both firms said they plan to actively engage in joint go-to-market activities for the solutions developed through the alliance.

Other Alliances

Apple and IBM, and now Samsung and Red Hat, are not the only partnerships targetting the enterprise mobility sector.

Last year, Cisco and Citrix joined forces for an enterprise mobility infrastructure solution, saddled with the catchy moniker of the ‘Cisco Mobile Workspace Solution with Citrix’.

Apple meanwhile is actively targeting the enterprise market to help revive flagging sales of its tablet portfolio. It has reportedly created a dedicated enterprise mobility sales team.

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