Red Hat and Samsung Business Services on Tuesday announced a strategic alliance to deliver the next generation of mobile solutions for the enterprise.
The alliance, announced at the Red Hat Summit 2015, combines the strengths of each company — Samsung’s mobile device portfolio and Red Hat’s open source middleware, mobile and cloud technologies.
This mobile solutions partnership will allow the firms to go to market both individually and together, said Cathal McGloin, vice president of mobile platforms for Red Hat.
The two companies formed the partnership to deliver mobile solutions that enable rapid development and integration of enterprise applications for organizations moving toward a mobile-first strategy. The alliance will capitalize on blending each company’s consumer and business leadership.
The collaboration will deliver the next generation of mobile enterprise applications and solutions and will shape the future of innovation, said Samsung EVP and Chief Enterprise Innovation Officer Robin Bienfait.
“Red Hat and Samsung have an opportunity to build what could become an entirely new model and environment for open collaboration,” noted Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.
If they achieve their goals, I expect business customers and developers will respond enthusiastically,” he told LinuxInsider.
Next-Gen Appeal
Mobility is a top priority for many businesses as a means to drive innovation, streamline operational efficiency, and develop new business models. The next generation of mobile business solutions is expected to be defined by greater levels of openness, agility and access to critical business information, according to Red Hat.
However, the new technologies still have to maintain required levels of security. Red Hat and Samsung Business Services intend to develop mobility solutions that deliver on those needs, and help businesses advance and accelerate their mobile initiatives.
“Getting apps out to enterprise customers has a couple of problems,” said Gregg Ostrowski, vice president for global enterprise services at Samsung.
“One is the back end. As mobility matures and folks want to be more innovative on their mobile platforms, you have to be able to connect to the enterprise data,” he told LinuxInsider. “So connecting with Red Hat was a very good partnership for us to solve that problem.”
The top concerns for CIOs today are security and app integration. Samsung has its Knox product to get security covered. Red Hat has the integration covered, Red Hat’s McGloin told LinuxInsider.
“So companies that want to put some of their important processes on mobile, we can go help them. You haven’t got that anywhere else,” he said.
What’s Planned
Samsung Business Services and Red Hat plan to deliver business applications, a developer ecosystem, support services, and business collaboration within the industry. The initial phase of the alliance will be focused in the U.S.
Business applications will include a series of enterprise-ready industry-specific mobile applications that will run on the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform. These will address key workforce management and business tasks, such as business intelligence, field and customer service, inventory management and sales catalog, pricing, ordering and invoicing.
The applications can be customized and tailored to fit the needs of an organization’s unique needs. The mobile applications will run on Android and other operating environments via the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform. They will be configurable to integrate into common enterprise back-end systems.
The developer community will supply tools and resources to build and nurture a new ecosystem of enterprise partners to promote rapid innovation and availability of solutions that meet both current and emerging mobility needs.
The ecosystem will rely on support services to provide integrated support for customers and partners, enterprise mobility management, and global delivery and support services for the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform.
Both Red Hat and Samsung Business Services plan to use their business collaboration to actively engage in joint go-to-market activities for the solutions developed through the alliance.
Enterprise Market Target
The strategic alliance primarily will market mobile solutions to enterprises. The enterprise is not necessarily looking for apps off the shelf, according to Samsung’s Ostrowski.
“They are looking for stuff that is tailored to their own environment. This agreement allows us to address those complexities of the enterprise that are not as cookie-cutter as one would like,” he said.
Even some consumer applications may need to integrate into an enterprise back end — but the sales target is the enterprise market.
Significant Step
Given the relative size and influence of the two companies, the deal has every chance of success, according to King.
The technological underpinnings of the partnership initially support Android-based solutions, but the aim is to include other mobile operating systems.
“This means the partnership could resonate well beyond the two companies, King said.
BlackBerry continues to show weakness, he pointed out.
Other sizable partnerships, like IBM/Apple, focus on single operating environments, added King, so RedHat and Samsung’s deal could help chart a new course for business mobility.
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