It’s no secret that Samsung has been focusing more and more on enterprise customers lately. They want to be not just the defacto Android OEM for consumers, but also for enterprise users. But enterprise users are very different than normal consumers, and have very different needs. They want a lot more security and apps that are targeted at them, for work.
The first part has been mostly solved by Samsung with the Knox security suite, which restrict user privileges to the phone for most apps, effectively creating a sandbox for the apps that enterprise customers want to use, and the second one (actually providing them with those specialized apps) is being solved right now, with Samsung’s new app store for business.
Samsung is working with enterprise giants such as Citrix and SAP, and the list of customers will also include Microsoft, and Salesforce.com in the future. Samsung has made available an SDK for enterprise that gives access to 1,000 API’s that can take advantage of special functionalities and accessories such as Samsung’s S-pen.
It’s surprising to see Google fall a little behind on this, because they’re actually pushing hard their services and apps in enterprise, and they have even a marketplace for enterprise apps. I suppose they couldn’t have done much about it right now, because they’re just getting started with Motorola, and it will be a while before Motorola can make a big push into the enterprise market.
Google can, in the meantime, make Android as a whole a lot more suited for enterprise. Some of their latest security features in Android 4.3 show that, too. Samsung’s Knox is basically the same SELinux core from Android 4.3, and Google has also made it harder to root Android 4.3 devices (through vulnerabilities). In the end, Google still wins if enterprise customers think a lot more Android devices, and not just Samsung’s Android devices, are suitable for them, because then they can start selling their own apps and services on top of those Android devices. In the mean time, Samsung is taking lead and will push ahead with its own app store for business users.