SAP & Samsung Team Up To Develop Mobile, Wearable Apps For Industry

SAP and Samsung have announced they are to team up in order to develop new enterprise applications for mobile and wearable devices.

The partnership will combine Samsung’s hardware and SAP’s mobile application platform alongside the SAP HANA cloud platform to create tools that can help companies create custom business apps for devices running Android or Tizen.

The new apps will be designed to operate and interact will the full range of Samsung devices, including wearables such as the Galaxy Gear family of smartwatches (pictured below) and the “ruggedized” Samsung Galaxy Tab Active, which could be used out in the field to access data.

Interactive

The retail, oil & gas, healthcare and financial services industries will be among the first to benefit from the partnership, with the first apps set to include features such as voice control and gesture interface.

This could extend to retail assistants being able to quickly access data on stock, as well as customer information to help with a query or purchase. Healthcare professionals would also benefit from being able to look through patient data using a mobile device, which can be transported between consultations.

“Increasingly, our customers are away from the desk and require a fundamentally new way to interact with the enterprise applications to align with how they work today,” said Steve Lucas, president of SAP’s Platform Solutions Group.

“The applications that match the current trends in mobility must work to create a seamless experience as the work modality embraces mobile devices, wearables, Internet of Things and other alternative forms of mobile computing. Through our partnership with Samsung, we are working on plans to offer a premium mobile enterprise experience for customers.”

Samsung has been looking for new areas to expand into after its smartphone sales fell sharply during its last quarterly profits, with rumours last week suggesting the company is looking at reinventing its mobile device offerings.

The company also recently released research which stated that the UK was losing up to £9.25 billion a year due to consumers and businesses not making the most out of smart technology, such as smartphones and connected devices.

UK businesses stand to lose £5.6 billion over the next 12 months unless adoption is accelerated, Samsung claimed, an average saving of £81,000 per firm if smart technology was rolled out in every department – however only one in ten had deployed any such innovations.

“As a market leader in smart devices and solutions, we know how to bridge consumer expectations for what a premium mobile experience should feel like with a readiness for the enterprise environment,” said Seokpil Kim, head of the Global B2B Centre at Samsung Electronics.

“We’re committed to building a world-class, open and comprehensive enterprise mobility ecosystem and delivering the best-in-class enterprise solutions that combine the strengths of Samsung’s mobile innovations and the SAP Mobile Platform.”

The new partnership follows a similar deal signed between Apple and IBM in July, which would see the latter bring its cloud, analytics and mobile management services to the former’s iOS software as well as supply customers with iPhones and iPads running industry-specific applications.

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