VDC Research: Enterprise & Government Mobility Market Blog

Samsung’s Search for Success in Enterprise Mobility

The company is putting all the building blocks together to potentially become a significant enterprise mobility solutions and services player. 

In 2014, Samsung watched its mobile sales drop 21 percent as increased competition further ate away at the company’s market share in the smartphone space. Apple’s consumer-friendly iOS garnered greater control of the high-end smartphone market with the company’s release of a “large-display” iPhone 6 and 6 plus. At the other end of the spectrum, low-end manufacturers such as Xiaomi captured Samsung’s market share—particularly in emerging markets—by producing similar devices with lower prices. As a result, the rapid evolution of the smartphone market has left Samsung squeezed between, and battling Apple and low-end manufacturers. Cognizant of the adverse trend moving against them and keen for alternative avenues of differentiation, Samsung has for several years been increasing its mobile presence in the enterprise space—a market still fairly open for penetration following the decline of BlackBerry and relative neglect by Apple.

A Move into Business Services

When it comes to enterprise mobility, the consumer still rules. The proliferation of “bring your own device” (BYOD) policies throughout the business world requires that a company produce devices sought after by consumers. Given the highly-competitive consumer device landscape, Samsung spent the past few years developing partnerships, software-capabilities, and enterprise mobility expertise to augment their hardware business, addressing the security, management and support requirements critical to enterprise decision makers. To augment these partners, Samsung is also investing in enterprise mobility service capabilities and in January launched the Samsung Business Services program. This program takes a three-tiered approach to addressing the demand for mobility in the enterprise space and builds upon unique capabilities such as KNOX that Samsung has long been developing. At a high level, Samsung intends to be a technology collaborator with an extensive ecosystem of partners to provide mobile solutions to customers.

However, while providing comprehensive support to enterprise customers is helpful and desired by some companies, it will not alone significantly increase the demand for devices. Moreover, the idea that companies desire a seamless and integrated system for managing all things mobile is not revolutionary, with many enterprise IT powerhouses – for example Microsoft or IBM – increasingly well positioned to deliver these capabilities. The key challenge for a company like Samsung – that continues to derive the majority of its mobile revenues through hardware sales – is whether they can affect enterprise decisions in today’s heterogeneous/multi-platform environment. Our contention is that as enterprise’s mobility initiatives continue to become more strategic – and mobile deployment models shift from BYOD to COPE (or more enterprise influenced mobile decisions) – that these enterprise investments and initiatives will provide greater returns.   

A Vertical Focus for a Meaningful Impact

Another layer of Samsung’s enterprise approach is establishing vertical or industry specific know-how. Acknowledging that to become “business critical” requires, by in large, focusing on the nuances of certain industries, and creating specific solutions to industry problems; Samsung has tailored its products to the education, healthcare, government, hospitality, and retail industries. These large verticals possess certain characteristics and unique business processes that are in need of technological and mobile solutions. By addressing the concerns of these industries—security, regulation, rapid technological change, etc. — Samsung has the opportunity to become ingrained in business processes, and thus become “business critical”. Today’s these capabilities are still largely a work in process as Samsung invests in building out this institutional knowledge. Given the complexities and nuances associated with many vertical opportunities, this will require staying power from Samsung.

Another critical cog in Samsung’s enterprise push is their extended partnership with BlackBerry. Samsung has integrated BlackBerry’s mobile-billing and encryption technologies into its KNOX platform, enhancing its position in the high end of the security bracket in highly regulated industries. Following the collaboration on the BlackBerry SecuTablet – which features Samsung’s S 10.5 hardware and Knox for device encryption, secure apps and software from BlackBerry and app wrapping technology from IBM – new rumors are surfacing around a Samsung-BlackBerry co-developed Android smartphone. Depending on the success of these initiatives, even closer ties between both organizations is not out of the question.

Finally, the partnership between Red Hat and Samsung, to a certain degree similar to the one between Apple and IBM, looks to provide industry-specific applications that address business concerns and needs. Ultimately this is all about mobile applications and mobilizing enterprise workflows, an area that has been lacking. Leveraging Red Hat’s mobile application platform and optimizing enterprise specific applications on Samsung devices will be central to this relationship. However, the ability of these applications to address business problems will largely go under-utilized unless Samsung can reach the decision makers at these companies. Further in-roads must be made to gain the ear of decision-makers, whom often lie outside the IT department.

Staying the Course 

That Samsung is looking to capitalize on mobility demands from the enterprise space is not surprising. The company is putting all the building blocks together to potentially become a significant enterprise mobility solutions and services player. They are clearly not alone with these pursuits, with a more enterprise savvy Apple and a resurging Microsoft – among others – representing key challengers. Microsoft will be particularly interesting to follow with palpable anticipation surrounding Windows 10, their OneDrive for Business solution and leading enterprise identity and access management assets. With the enterprise mobility ‘debate’ shifting towards content and identity management, Microsoft’s position is especially strong.    

With much of the enterprise mobility opportunity still ahead of us, Samsung is increasingly well positioned. However, as a company that interprets success on quantity of devices sold, it will be critical for Samsung to set realistic expectations for their enterprise strategy. Staying power and focus will be critical.

Be sure to check out our upcoming VDC View as we dig deeper into this topic!

With David Krebs

WWDC: Enterprise Recap

While the themes at WWDC were consumer oriented, there actually were some key enterprise elements.

Apple’s highly anticipated annual Worldwide Developers Conference occurred on Monday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. As expected, many of the developments revolved around consumer products, namely the Apple Watch and a new music streaming service, Apple Music. However, enterprise enhancements were also present, as Apple looks to increase its presence in corporate environments.

In keeping with recent tradition, Apple announced its new operating systems: iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan, which allow for greater integration among devices. The new OS X does not include many new features, but iOS 9 provides some new improvements that enhance the competitiveness of the iPhone and iPad in both consumer and enterprise markets. The new iOS features a battery saving mode which Apple claims will add three additional hours of battery life.  The company is late in incorporating this feature, which consumers clearly have been asking for - other prominent OEMs such as Samsung, Huawei and HTC have offered this capability for some time now. iPads have become more business friendly under the new operating system as new multitasking features were implemented. In particular, the new split screen feature similar to that present in Windows and some Android tablets will allow users to use separate apps simultaneously. In addition, the iPad will include a trackpad feature allowing for greater control and quick typing. These enhancements should allow for increased user-productivity, and illustrate Apple’s attempt to further outfit the iPad as a hybrid- laptop replacement similar to Microsoft’s Surface tablet.

Despite the changes mentioned above, the WWDC did not entail any significant developments or changes that will affect Apple’s overall trajectory. The new operating system for the Apple Watch and the new music streaming service may increase consumer support for Apple products; however, the innovations relating to enterprise will likely not significantly increase corporate demand. The changes to the iPad amount to Apple merely catching up to Microsoft and Samsung by incorporating a true multitasking feature. This new development takes the place of an old feature claimed by Apple to be multitasking, but in reality was more akin to app-switching. New security features, such as the addition of a six-digit passcode and the option to force enable passcodes on corporate owned devices, will certainly garner support among those in the corporate world looking to protect their corporate information from what appear to be endless data breaches. This enhancement also follows in part from Microsoft’s emphasis on security, as exemplified by Windows 10’s sophisticated containerization capabilities.

Apple has also made clear on its website that several features important to the business community will be made available in the near feature. Promised improvements in networking and device management have the ability to greatly improve business processes through increased functionality. Unfortunately, Apple does not provide any information regarding these enhancements on their website so their usefulness remains a mystery. These are critical enterprise elements to iOS 9; to date Apple has done a great job at augmenting the EMM elements of its OS, and we look forward hearing more about these key features.

 

A key advantage for Apple remains its App store, which for the past year has included Microsoft Office as one of its offerings. The prevalence of the App store is exemplified by the fact that 98 percent of Fortune 500 companies feature an app in the Apple App Store. Furthermore, the new spotlight search feature should allow for greater efficiency in the utilization of applications, seeing as the search results will include information present in older apps that may have been forgotten. The unification of multiple platforms working and interacting together may allow for efficiency gains as employees work more frequently outside the office. Microsoft has followed Apple’s lead in attempting to develop a similar network across devices with its new operating system, Windows 10. However, while both these companies appear to have an eye on the future, the gains of such forward thinking may be farther off as companies will need time to realize the productivity and monetary gains from such integration. In essence, the WWDC highlighted Apple’s continued efforts to cater to its strong consumer base while augmenting its enterprise feature set.  Balancing consumer and enterprise demands is a challenge faced by all OEMs and begs the question- who will be the first to offer a business edition phone (a la BlackBerry)?