Samsung, who had arguably the most successful 2012 of any mobile phone manufacturer, says it plans to put a lot of energy into two major categories as we head into the new year. The company’s first goal is to have its devices adopted my more corporations and enterprise users. Samsung says it has noticed RIM’s recent struggles and sees a wide open spot for them in the workplace.
In a recent interview at CES 2013, Samsung’s Chief Product Officer Kevin Packingham offered his thoughts on the company’s goal. “The enterprise space has suddenly become wide open. The RIM problems certainly fueled a lot of what the CIOs are going through, which is they want to get away from a lot of the proprietary solutions,” Packingham said. He went on to say that businesses want something that integrates with their IT system already in place and confirmed that “Samsung is investing in that area.” While Samsung has focused on the enterprise market in the past, it felt it really needed a device that brought its name into the spotlight. “It’s been a focus for a long time but the products have evolved now that we can really take advantage of that,” Packingham added. “We knew we had to build more tech devices to successfully enter the enterprise market. What really turned that needle was that we had the power of the GS3.”
Samsung has had certain corporations offer its devices to employees before, including German business software maker SAP. SAP offers up ten devices to its employees, including the iPhone, iPad, Galaxy S III, and Galaxy Tab, and lets them choose one.
“The one clear trend in enterprise is the shift away from one device to multiple devices,” said SAP Chief Information Officer Oliver Bussmann. Android fragmentation was a concern for them, which is why they decided to exclusively offer Samsung Android devices. “Because of the fragmentation of the Android software, we decided to go with just one Android company and we went with Samsung,” he added.
Packingham went on to say that Samsung is also strongly looking into ways to offer more content to its customers and integrating it between all of the company’s devices. Media is an area in which Android devices have lacked since the operating systems inception and its also one of Apple’s strong points.
“You are going to see from content services, we’ll start to integrate what’s happening on the big screen, what’s happening on the tablet,” the Samsung executive said. “We know now that people like to explore content that they are watching on TV while they have a tablet in their lap, and that’s going to be a big theme for this year.”
Source: Reuters