Ericsson and SAP AG announced at this week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC – check out all pieces) that they have signed an agreement to jointly market and sell cloud-based, machine-to-machine solutions and services to enterprises via operators around the globe. The solutions will be based on a combined software-as-a-service offering from Ericsson and SAP within M2M.
The combined solution is powered by Ericsson’s device connection platform & service enablement platform and by the SAP Hana platform. The companies said they were looking to address enterprise needs to lower barriers toward the adoption of M2M solutions, such as lack of complete multi-industry end-to-end offerings.
The platform they will offer is designed to enable operators to provide M2M services to enterprises in an as-a-service model, including a full end-to-end logistics solution, along with M2M connectivity, applications and cloud services. They said they are already discussing the model with operators.
Samsung unveils KNOX for BYOD
In other enterprise news, Samsung Electronics released the next phase of its program to make its Android smart devices fit for enterprise deployment. The company announced KNOX, an end-to-end secure solution that provides security hardening from the hardware through to the application layer. It offers a container solution that separates business and personal use of a mobile device. According to the company, KNOX incorporates security enhanced Android developed by the National Security Agency and integrity management services implemented in both hardware and the Android framework.
Tony Cripps, devices and platforms analyst at Ovum, said the “application container” is similar to BlackBerry’s Balance, plus support for over 300 IT policies and more than 700 mobile device management application programming interfaces.
KNOX demonstrates Samsung’s growing appreciation of the security and management needs of enterprise users and the value of integrating such features into its Android smart devices out of the box. This could be an important differentiator over most of Samsung’s Android device rivals, for which bring-your-own-device and other enterprise mobility initiatives largely take a back seat. However, the functionality will only extended to “selected” Galaxy devices beginning in the second quarter, he commented.
Check out more enterprise-focused cloud announcements made at MWC:
- Centrify announced the launch of its unified identity solution for secure enablement of enterprise mobile, SaaS and BYOD environments. According to the company, the new Centrify cloud services integrate mobile device management, mobile application management and SaaS. The Centrify for Mobile 2013 and Centrify for SaaS 2013 are a set of integrated capabilities enabled by the Centrify cloud services platform aimed at delivering secure, enterprise-class mobility with integrated application single sign-on to improve security and increase workforce productivity in the enterprise. The firm specializes in unified identity services across data center, cloud and mobile also released that its latest innovation has been chosen by Samsung Electronics to provide key enabling technology for Samsung’s next generation mobile enterprise solution.
