Digital transformation is increasingly becoming a “core competency” for enterprise CIOs as they are tasked with taking full advantage of technology to streamline processes and explore new revenue opportunities. While a digital transformation strategy can encompass a range of technologies, deploying effective mobile apps to the enterprise workforce to better meet customers’ expectations for real-time responsiveness is critical. With this in mind, in June 2015, Samsung announced a partnership with Red Hat, a provider of open source, enterprise IT solutions. This partnership leverages Red Hat’s Mobile Application Platform for mobile enterprise application development, providing a cloud-based environment for building mobile apps that are tightly integrated into the back-end infrastructures of enterprises. It’s an important collaborative partnership that has helped us to accelerate mobile application deployments for our enterprise customers as they move aggressively toward digital transformation.
The Road to Digital Transformation
On the road to digital transformation, organizations face a number of roadblocks in terms of security, managing complexity, life cycle management, deployment, off-the-shelf apps and ownership of enterprise apps that may be outside the control of the IT department. The goal of this partnership is to help enterprises build a strategy to facilitate this process.
The partnership allows us to help businesses accelerate transformation so that they can fully leverage the opportunities offered by digital technologies without the need to make significant investments in their legacy systems. We are helping businesses move rapidly along the enterprise mobility curve by providing a service that easily allows them to achieve the next level of mobility, beyond simply providing access to basic apps such as email and calendars. As many organizations are just now beginning their digital transformations, this will be an ongoing partnership that provides them with a long-term strategy for success to not only transform one or two applications, but to roll out many to their enterprises over time.
The Service Offering
Over the past year, we’ve partnered with Red Hat to offer enterprises the ability to build custom or semi-custom apps using its platform. We provide application support services to help develop mobile apps tailored to the needs of a particular business that are fully integrated into back-end infrastructure using Mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) technology. This allows security policies as well as life cycle management and deployment to be managed centrally. Successful enterprise mobility strategies also require that all apps run on secure devices, and that they safely store data. Therefore, Samsung Knox, with its multilayered hardware and software security, is a vital component.
Progress to Date
Over the past year or so, we have jointly built a series of apps for key enterprise systems such as SAP and Microsoft Active Directory, covering areas such as sales, inventory management, asset management and conferencing. By providing apps such as these, we offer our customers building blocks that can be easily customized. Some of the apps developed leverage three different systems (which would otherwise require three separate apps), such as one that combines sales and order information, inventory data, CRM for contact management, and tracking and logistics management to provide visibility over the location of an order in transit.
Examples of what we are doing include digitizing workflows for specific user groups, such as creating an app in the manufacturing space that enables workers to streamline processes that are typically paper-based, improving quality and reducing overall costs. Another is a mobile app for the field services industry that connects to an older system that workers would generally log into once a day to get their work orders. But with the app, they can receive push updates to see up-to-date information in real time. This app leverages Red Hat’s platform to transform how the processes work without requiring large back-end investments in software upgrades for mobile content.
Rapid, Customizable Mobile Enterprise Application Development Is Key
To achieve digital transformation, many organizations are looking to change their overall strategy, as they need to create a mobile plan for all of their disparate systems. All legacy apps associated with those systems need a mobile front end, and businesses should have a long-term plan for creating many new apps for use throughout the organization, all connected via a common backend and shared across different systems. The journey to digital transformation may just be beginning, but with services like this, it doesn’t have to be a long, expensive and arduous one. Rapid and customizable mobile enterprise application development is key to achieving digital transformation goals.
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