Dan's Take

Red Hat, Samsung Partner To Create IoT Enterprise Solutions

It appears to be similar to the IBM/Apple Arrangement.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 06/24/2015

Red Hat and Samsung announced at the Red Hat Summit that they were going to work together to "deliver the next generation of mobile enterprise applications and solutions."

Here's a snippet of what they're offering:

Business applications: A series of enterprise-ready industry-specific mobile applications that will run on the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform and 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 mobile applications will run on Android and other operating environments via the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform, and will be configurable to integrate into common enterprise back-end systems.

Established systems, software and hardware suppliers believe that the Internet of Things (IoT) is likely to change the face of enterprise computing like it has changed the consumer market for products and services. Each of them wants to position itself as having the best strategy to move forward. Unfortunately, this also means that these early strategies are likely to be based upon proprietary approaches that can only serve the needs of a portion of the market.

The first example is the IBM/Apple partnership. In that partnership, IBM planned to deliver backend development tools, runtime environments and other support services to simplify the delivery of enterprise solutions when the client endpoint device was one of Apple's iOS-based devices. An analysis of that is available here.

Dan's Take: A Sign of Things To Come
Stopping for a moment to consider the potential impact, we need to consider the reach of the client-side technology supplier. Data from IDC indicates that a collaboration centering on Android devices is likely to reach more enterprises and more professionals:

Worldwide Smartphone OS Share

Source: IDC, May 2015

Digging deeper into the report finds that Samsung had a market share of just under 25 percent in Q1 2015, 6.3 percent more than Apple's share. Since Red Hat's approach is typically based on open source technology, it's very likely it could be extended to support other Android-based devices in the short term, and other devices in the medium term.

The race between the IBM/Apple and the Red Hat/Samsung teams should be very exciting and worth watching. My bet is that we're going to see other partnerships in the near future that address the same business requirements.