Samsung Electronics Co., the world's biggest seller of smartphones to consumers now aims to win more corporate and government clients. But the South Korean technology giant needs some set of skills to face the new challenge of building a customer-service network to work with enterprises as well as a robust security platform satisfying the needs of the world's most-security-conscious network managers.
Samsung's security system for mobile devices, called Knox, has been reported to have delays and programming bugs, frustrating clients including the U.S. Defense Department. Samsung has acknowledged the problems and is now addressing the issues behind it. If the company can address the concern, it could be a good shot at wresting control of the enterprise device market from ailing BlackBerry, the Canadian smartphone maker which security features made it the gold standard for years among government officials and corporate executives.
For Samsung, fixing that perception has become a top priority. Selling more devices in the corporate businesses could help the company meet its ambitious target of doubling company sales by 2020. Samsung executives first identified the corporate smartphone market as a potential gold mine in 2011, as BlackBerry was rapidly weakening.
In order for Samsung to introduce Knox quickly across its devices, its chief technology officer had the new security platform integrated into every stage of phone development requiring an unusually high level of cooperation between the hardware engineers in South Korea and Samsung's software teams, many of whom work in the U.S. The idea behind Knox is to give corporate tech administrators control over their employees' Samsung devices. It also allows tech administrators to remotely shut down devices if they have been compromised or lost, and alerts administrators if it appears that a device's base code has been tampered with.
To be sure, few rollouts in the tech world are free of hiccups, and developers frequently run through several beta versions before delivering a final product. But Samsung's failings have been particularly vexing to U.S. government officials, who have been looking for government-approved alternatives to BlackBerrys for over a year, according to the people familiar with the situation.
In a statement released by Samsung, the company has received strong interest and positive feedback from its customers about Knox, adding that it is working with "several Fortune 500 and government customers" on deploying the security system and expected large scale success in 2014.
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