Samsung, SAP in Enterprise Mobility Collaboration Deal

Mobile device maker Samsung and enterprise software provider SAP (SAP) plan to develop industry-specific mobile solutions to run on the Korean manufacturer’s devices and wearables, in an enterprise mobility deal that mirrors the arrangement Apple (APPL) and IBM (IBM) struck last summer.

The companies said their collaboration would create new opportunities for developers to craft integrated solutions for mobile devices and wearables and construct cloud-based services founded on SAP’s HANA platform. Inasmuch as the initiative’s jointly developed mobile applications will be built to take advantage of Samsung’s device capabilities, the goal will be to provide workforces standardizing on the vendor’s gear a competitive advantage, the parties said.

“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,” said Steve Lucas, SAP Platform Solutions Group president. “Through our partnership with Samsung, we are working on plans to offer a premium mobile enterprise experience for customers.”

Samsung and SAP said vertical markets present the greatest opportunity for their collaboration to bring value to customers with the initially targeted segments spanning finance, healthcare, oil and gas and retail.

With finance, the companies said they plan to jointly develop mobile banking solutions to improve the customer experience, including printers and large format displays. For health care, they plan to bring HANA-based analytics to Samsung’s mobile devices with cloud-centric health management solutions. For oil and gas, the pair intend to deliver solutions for wearable devices to enable workers in heavy industries to receive and respond to information more quickly and safely. And, for retail, Samsung and SAP said they will focus on improving the shopping experience by providing retailers with quicker access to inventory and product availability data accessed through Samsung mobile devices, wearables and large format displays.

Other critical business tasks such as accessing customer data, looking up product information and implementing mobile payments also are in their plans.

Samsung and SAP further said they will develop customer relationship management (CRM), human capital management (HCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions on the HANA platform delivered through Samsung mobile devices.

In July, Apple and IBM inked an enterprise mobility deal—the first industry-specific apps from that collaboration are due out any day now, following Apple’s launch last week of its new AppleCare for Enterprise service—and now the iPhone maker is hiring a dedicated sales team to huddle with potential corporate customers and work with a handful of business mobile app specialists.

IBM is building 100 mobile enterprise solutions for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, developing new cloud services optimized for iOS and constructing new packaged offerings for device activation, supply and management. The hook for Apple is IBM’s inclusion of its predictive data analytics and enterprise-level security in the new app lineup.

The first round of industry-specific solutions are slated to hit the market this month with apps in banking, government, insurance, retail, travel and transportation and telecommunications.