By Nicholas Greene
Samsung has joined forces with SAP to combine its mobile innovations with SAP Mobile Platform in an effort to open up new avenues for both developers and enterprise customers across multiple industries.
The overarching strategy is to design an enterprise mobility ecosystem based on Samsung’s array of mobile devices. The ecosystem would allow developers the ability to build solutions that can use the offerings from both companies for mobile devices and wearables, as well as the joint cloud solutions currently offered by SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services.
The announcement was made at SAP TechEd && d-code in Berlin.
Another key part of the strategy revolves around the retail market, in which payments could be made ‘on the go’, which could provide benefits both in terms of consumer experience and in generating useful data for retailers.
“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 Center, 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.”
Other goals of the collaboration include giving enterprise applications a shorter time-to-market, rapid access to revenue streams, and the ability to improve real-time decision support in house.
“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 platform Solutions Group, SAP. “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 and SAP will initially focus in key vertical markets such as retail, oil and gas, finance and healthcare.
Other key elements of the collaboration include providing the ability for developers to use the SAP Fiori and SAP Field Service for Samsung’s device portfolio to improve user experience; developing scalable CRM, HCM and ERP solutions on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, and collaborating on new applications and solutions through a Joint Innovation Center.
