Samsung marshalls partners for corporate assault

Samsung is seeking to cement its position in the corporate market with a range of enterprise mobility offerings launched in conjunction with several major channel partners.

The Samsung Enterprise Mobility Offering offers several new features, including enterprise email, instant messaging security, mobile device management, unified communications, customer relationship management, salesforce automation and business intelligence.

The products, showcased at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, have been developed with channel partners including Cisco, Formotus, Microsoft, Spring Wireless, Sybase and Wipro. Enterprise software giants including Oracle, SAP and IBM are expected to be added throughout the year.

Each of the partners will offer Samsung customers a range of solutions. For example, Cisco will provide mobile web conferencing via its WebEx arm, as well as mobile security and unified comms capabilities, while Spring Wireless will offer the ability to connect mobile workers to corporate systems.

Samsung also confirmed that it will add Android support to its devices, and offer enterprise solutions on the Linux-based LiMo platform and Samsung's own Bada mobile operating system to offer more choice and flexibility.

W P Hong, executive vice president of Samsung's mobile communications business, hopes that the move will help strengthen Samsung's place as a major player in the enterprise mobility market.

"Support from leading enterprise partners and major operators means we can meet our commitment to deliver the office computing environment to the smartphone," he said.

The company is in discussions with mobile operators to launch the products this year.

The news is yet another example of mobile phone providers looking to highlight their business credentials, and push the ability of their devices to run enterprise applications.

LG yesterday confirmed the launch of its Air Sync technology which it claims is the first form of cloud computing for smartphones.