[BBPandy]

Samsung Copies the BlackBerry Playbook - WSJ.com

Does anyone with a Wall Street Journal ID know what this article is about? It's definitly got a catchy title. Unfortunately you can't read it without logging in.

It's possilbe (if not probable) that this is just a click bait title, but on the off chance that it's something of note can someone please fill us in on it's contents?

Thanks

[anon(3249139)]

Seems to be about the enterprise stuff... nothing about the playbook product.

[metz9444]

Well given that they also are trying to get some of the enterprise market it is not a shock. Then again Samsung isn't the only one to rip off the playbook...cough ipad mini cough cough.

I'm curious to read the article too.

Posted via CB10

[k5resort]

The article isn't really about the Playbook. It's just another article on Samsung trying to go after BB's enterprise territory. It says Samsung is partnering with defense contractors and other security firms as well as snatching up all sorts of security experts and some ex-RIM executives to try to bolster Android some more and ultimately get their phones/tablets approved by the DoD, NSA etc. to prove their phones are secure.

BlackBerry's response to the WSJ was they are not surprised competitors are trying to get into the enterprise sector but they are late to the game. It says BlackBerry already has 3500+ enterprises and government agencies evaluating BB10.

[jpvj]

The link is public available to me right now...

[BBPandy]

The link is public available to me right now...

hmm in that case can you post it here for the rest of us?
Maybe it's regionaly available.

BTW if it's about BB ^ Enterprise why mention the PB? I guess I was right, it is a misleading click-bait title

[anon(3896606)]

hmm in that case can you post it here for the rest of us?
Maybe it's regionaly available.

BTW if it's about BB ^ Enterprise why mention the PB? I guess I was right, it is a misleading click-bait title

The definition of playbook is: a notebook containing descriptions and diagrams of the plays that a team has practiced (especially an American football team).
So what they are saying is correct (BB is known for their business side), probably a pun to the tablet as well.

[Tre Lawrence]

No matter how you cut it, it's not fun being the top dog in any market space. Ask Apple.

Samsung has the money and the momentum to nip away at BBRY. Hopefully, BBRY is able to shore up its Enterprise offerings.

[anon(3249139)]

hmm in that case can you post it here for the rest of us?
Maybe it's regionaly available.

BTW if it's about BB ^ Enterprise why mention the PB? I guess I was right, it is a misleading click-bait title

Samsung Electronics Co. 005930.SE -1.29% has spent the last several years luring smartphone consumers away from Apple Inc.'s AAPL +1.06% iPhones. Now, the South Korean giant is taking aim at Research In Motion Ltd.'s BB.T -4.60% still-formidable grip on the world's most security-conscious government and corporate clients.

Samsung is wooing chief information officers and government agencies, promising its phones—which run off Google Inc.'s GOOG +0.53% Android operating system—are just as secure as BlackBerrys. It has hired dozens of executives and salespeople from rivals and from mobile-security companies, while investing in other smaller, mobile security and data firms.

And it has tweaked a massive marketing campaign aimed at consumers, airing ads during the recent National Football League playoffs that poked fun specifically at the BlackBerry.

Samsung executives in South Korea have made enterprise sales a "top three priority" company-wide, said Tim Wagner, Samsung's Dallas-based general manager and vice president for enterprise sales, who was hired away from RIM in 2010. The company has recently closed deals for thousands of company-issued Samsung smartphones and tablets for big corporations like American Airlines Inc., Waste Management Inc., WM +0.52% and Boston Scientific Corp. BSX +1.52%

IDC, a market researcher, found over 50% of smartphones shipped to corporate customers last year were iPhones, while Samsung shipped 16% of that market. RIM, which had dominated the sector just a few years ago, saw its share shrink to 10% last year, IDC said.

While Apple is leading in recent shipments, RIM still has a large and global subscription base of corporate clients, many of whom worry about disrupting service or incurring new costs by changing their company-deployed smartphones. But RIM has lost a string of big corporate customers as companies increasingly allow employees to use their personal phones for work, making RIM a particularly attractive target for Samsung.

Samsung "is at a point where they can hit the market aggressively and take some share from RIM," said Jeff Johnston, a smartphone-market analyst at Detwiler Fenton, a Boston-based research and wealth management firm. "No question they see a wounded animal here."

Still, Samsung has a way to go in convincing some corporate clients. Android's operating system is used by a number of device makers, presenting security challenges by making those devices potentially easier to hack. It also makes applications running on the phones more susceptible to bugs.

Rich Aducci, the chief information officer at Boston Scientific, a medical-device maker, has ordered Samsung devices for simple tasks, like checking patients' glucose levels. But he isn't yet ready to open the company's networks more broadly to the devices.

"Ultimately, it's still running Android, and there's a limit to what they can do about security," Mr. Adduci said.

And RIM is fighting back hard. Last month, it unveiled its latest operating system, BlackBerry 10, and two new phones that will run off it, including an all-touch-screen version that is already selling in several markets and hits the U.S. next month. RIM is offering its business clients incentives to try BlackBerry 10, including free software upgrades and free training for IT departments.

"It's not surprising that competitors are scrambling to get into the enterprise (sector), but they're late to the game," said David J. Smith, executive vice president of mobile computing at RIM. RIM says that more than 3,500 enterprises and government agencies are currently evaluating the new BB10 OS. An Apple spokesperson didn't respond to requests for comment.

To bolster security of Samsung phones, the company offers its own secure software, which it calls SAFE, for "Samsung for Enterprise." Samsung says the product has been selling well, without giving specifics.

It has also hired at least half a dozen former senior executives from RIM, which has shed thousands of jobs amid its falling market share. Samsung has also hired technology experts from academia and security firms.

In 2011, it poached Injong Rhee, a well-respected computer science professor at North Carolina State University to spearhead its business-focused offerings. Mr. Rhee will be presenting some of those new products at a major technology conference in Barcelona next week.

Last year, Samsung snapped up Bryan Glancey, the founder of device-security firm Mobile Armor and a former executive at Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. He is now working to get Samsung devices adopted by government agencies.

Samsung also opened an office in Washington, D.C., and hired away Sony Corp.'s 6758.TO -2.63% long-time top lobbyist, Joel Wiginton, to run the office.

At the same time, Samsung is partnering with smaller business-technology firms with ties to U.S. government agencies that prize security. Earlier this year, Samsung Venture Investment Corp., the company's venture fund, made a small investment in Canadian mobile-security firm Fixmo Inc. and Boston-based mobile data firm Cloudant.

Fixmo's technology was developed in cooperation with the U.S. National Security Agency. Cloudant is funded in part by the Central Intelligence Agency through one of its subsidiaries.

Samsung has also joined forces with General Dynamics Corp., GD +1.25% the giant defense contractor, to get the NSA and the Pentagon's Defense Information Systems Agency to approve Samsung devices for those agencies—essentially a seal of approval for wider government-agency use. Samsung's flagship Galaxy devices already have a lower-level approval for use by some U.S. government agencies. But the company hasn't yet announced a big-name government partner.

The NSA "works with a broad range of commercial partners and research associates to ensure the availability of secure, tailored solutions for (Department of Defense) and national-security systems customer," an NSA spokeswoman said in a statement.

"The DoD continues to evaluate different mobile products with a multi-vendor approach," a DoD spokesman said in a statement.

[qbnkelt]

Not bloody likely at the moment, secure agencies run away from anything Android; my agency's chief CIO doesn't even allow you to get past the And.....

I use an SGIII, but I'm not blind to the fact that even though there are Android devices that are FIPS approved, Android security solutions are nowhere near BES.

There are instances of Android running within DOD and some agencies, true. But there are agencies that will not touch it, and those are the ones that are most secure ones. Sure, Android can be used at the Smithsonian for tour apps and such, or tablets may be given at the National Archives as part of guided tours, but behind firewalls with sensitive data???? Not at the moment for the most secure minded agencies.

[ajst222]

Well given that they also are trying to get some of the enterprise market it is not a shock. Then again Samsung isn't the only one to rip off the playbook...cough ipad mini cough cough.

I'm curious to read the article too.

Posted via CB10

Don't forget the Kindle Fire. I've heard "BlackBerry just copied the Kindle!" a few times. The PlayBook came first you idiots! Amazon copied the design. Pisses me off

[tonyrenier]

That's old news, it's from 2012 and the analysts who front for the bears keep reporting it.
More stock manipulation, which seems to be happening more frequently as BB 10 appears to be making a dent in the duopoly.

[anon(3310921)]

Interesting article on the subject. . .Why Samsung Won't Beat Blackberry in the Mobile Enterprise

Why Samsung Won't Beat Blackberry in the Mobile Enterprise
Samsung Safe aims to make Android phones better for the enterprise,
but using the least secure mobile OS out there and ignoring the IT-ready BlackBerry might not be a good move.

By Rob Enderle
Fri, February 22, 2013 inShare.
CIO � Earlier this week I was asked to review the Samsung Safe offering, which is being rolled out to make Samsung's Android phones more acceptable to the enterprise. Safe reminds me a lot of what vendors from Netscape to Sony did to address what they thought were enterprise needs and often showcased without actually speaking to their own IT organizations.
The issue comes down to the general tendency for technology companies to be run by engineers with no IT experience and therefore no real clue about what a business IT organization�including their own�actually does.
IT, when done right, is largely transparent. As a result, it's often taken for granted. This makes it hard to build products for IT without engaging IT and hiring people with significant IT experience to work on the effort.

BlackBerry: Keeping IT in Mind From the Beginning
BlackBerry started with businesses as its primary customers. Then known as Research in Motion, the company initially brought the two-way pager into the mainstream�and, unlike today's typical smartphones and tablets, these actually entered the market as executive tools, not consumer products. From the very start, the company had to learn what IT needed and how to protect top executives. These were lessons hard learned.

Look at BlackBerry security efforts, then, and you see that they start and end with targeted IT needs. BlackBerry ties its systems into IT policy, assuring that IT can easily get the devices to conform. This is critical; IT doesn't have the time to manage everything that's currently on the table, and BlackBerry is designed to assure compliance without significantly increasing IT overhead.

One of the most talked-about problems since the introduction of the smartphone is separating personal and corporate information. This is because IT doesn't want to deal with personal apps and files, and users don't want IT seeing their personal stuff.
BlackBerry separates the environments on its devices, giving the user his own space and letting IT manage and secure the business information under its control. This is unique in the market�and it was driven by IT demands for this feature.

When developing its unique tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, the company tied it to its overall security framework and sandboxed the apps so they can't do hostile things. Looking at the overall nature of email and application attacks, BlackBerry created permissions and monitoring components that directly address the damage these attacks can cause, even though BlackBerry platform is generally less likely to be attacked than one of the consumer platforms.

Samsung: Start With an Insecure Platform, Bolt on Security
Samsung, in contrast, created Safe. The company started with Android, the only platform actively being blocked by IT organizations due to security concerns. I was at an event last year where McAfee showcased that an Android phone can be remotely attacked, put into a loop, overheat and catastrophically fail.

Meanwhile, Kaspersky recently discovered spy software that turns on the microphone of the Android devices, recording what's being said in the room. Finally, SophosLabs documented five classes of hostile Android apps. Some, once installed, automatically install additional apps, send identity information to the attacker, or hijack social network accounts.
So Samsung started with a platform that, by any reasonable measure, provides inadequate security for personal use, let alone business use. Ideally, to fix the problem, the company should have done what Amazon did with the Kindle and forked the code, creating a unique and more secure version of Android that wouldn't be as vulnerable.

Instead, Samsung went with mobile device management (MDM)�which, in the case of a vulnerable platform, only makes IT more responsible for adverse results but doesn't address the core security problems. The company implemented encryption, which can protect the files unless a user's identity is stolen, which unfortunately is the purpose of much Android malware. Samsung also installed a VPN, which actually makes a compromised device more dangerous, because VPNs tunnel through the perimeter security of a business, potentially granting even greater access to the attacker. Finally, the company made email connectivity improvements, which also giving an attacker greater access via a compromised phone.
All in all, this showcases that Samsung, a broad-based manufacturing company, doesn't understand IT needs nor the actual vulnerabilities that IT needs to address. For a period last year, Samsung phones were less secure than other Android phones.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
Generally, when a company is new to IT, it takes an existing product and patches it to look IT-like. Then, upon learning that that approach sucks, it goes back and creates a product from scratch that's designed specifically to meet its compliance and security needs.

Android, as it is, is too insecure to patch this way. Samsung may eventually realize that Blackberry and even Apple are closer to the mark; both companies control their own platform in order to provide an acceptable business solution. In the end, when you compare BlackBerry to Samsung, you can see that BlackBerry is an enterprise vendor. Samsung, not so much.

Rob Enderle is president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group. Previously, he was the Senior Research Fellow for Forrester Research and the Giga Information Group. Prior to that he worked for IBM and held positions in Internal Audit, Competitive Analysis, Marketing, Finance and Security. Currently, Enderle writes on emerging technology, security and Linux for a variety of publications and appears on national news TV shows that include CNBC, FOX, Bloomberg and NPR.
Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn.

[dbmalloy]

Problem for Samsung and Android is they are competing with a mature OS that was built from the ground up for security... As BB is proprietary and Android is open source the best Samsung can hope to create a patchwork security to plus the holes... To truely compete Samsung would pretty much have to recreate the BB encryption and network services..... this does not mean they will be shut out of enterprise business but whether they can dominate as BB has is questionable at best....

[anon(3310921)]

My only question is that with BYOD being a huge trend (despite questions of increased cost and reduced possible IT management) do you feel like the enterprise market share will begin to look like the consumer space (the few top executives will rock the Berry, your #2 middle management folks will all sport Apple, and your entry level horde will all run android. . .)?

[BBPandy]

For a period last year, Samsung phones were less secure than other Android phones.

He's not the first person I've heard say that about Samsung's "SAFE" phones when they first came out.

[Emu the Foo]

Ahhhhh. Makes sense.

[chrysaurora]

My only question is that with BYOD being a huge trend (despite questions of increased cost and reduced possible IT management) do you feel like the enterprise market share will begin to look like the consumer space (the few top executives will rock the Berry, your #2 middle management folks will all sport Apple, and your entry level horde will all run android. . .)?

On this topic, I have mentioned something before but I think people didn't really understand it's potential and hence there wasn't much discussion about it. Let me bring this up again:

I attended BlackBerry Experience Forum (Feb 5, Toronto) and one of the things that BlackBerry demonstrated at the conference was BlackBerry WorkSpace App. This is a fantastic app. What it does is this:
- loads on iOS and Android
- creates a secure, encrypted workspace on it
- Once you open the app, it has it's own calendar, contacts, emails.
And ties with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES 10) and accepts IT policy from there.

So, the employee is able to use whatever personal BYOD device they want to use but their email/contacts/calendar and company information remains within BlackBerry WorkSpace sandbox that is connected via BES and can be managed by company's IT staff. It's like having a Virtual BlackBerry. My guess is that BlackBerry will charge similar fee as they currently charge for their BES/device license (CAL fee). So, regardless of what device the employee uses, BlackBerry still makes money as long as company pushes the WorkSpace app on employee's device.

This has HUGE revenue potential. BlackBerry will make money from even non BlackBerry devices.

[Tre Lawrence]

On this topic, I have mentioned something before but I think people didn't really understand it's potential and hence there wasn't much discussion about it. Let me bring this up again:

I attended BlackBerry Experience Forum (Feb 5, Toronto) and one of the things that BlackBerry demonstrated at the conference was BlackBerry WorkSpace App. This is a fantastic app. What it does is this:
- loads on iOS and Android
- creates a secure, encrypted workspace on it
- Once you open the app, it has it's own calendar, contacts, emails.
And ties with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES 10) and accepts IT policy from there.

So, the employee is able to use whatever personal BYOD device they want to use but their email/contacts/calendar and company information remains within BlackBerry WorkSpace sandbox that is connected via BES and can be managed by company's IT staff. It's like having a Virtual BlackBerry. My guess is that BlackBerry will charge similar fee as they currently charge for their BES/device license (CAL fee). So, regardless of what device the employee uses, BlackBerry still makes money as long as company pushes the WorkSpace app on employee's device.

This has HUGE revenue potential. BlackBerry will make money from even non BlackBerry devices.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this depends on the adoption of BES10 and the deployment of the app (theorized as an extra cost)?

On the one hand, it makes sense if one takes into account the rumors of BBRY going software only. Still, can they sell the additional piece (the app)?

Interesting...

[DaedalusIcarusHelios]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this depends on the adoption of BES10 and the deployment of the app (theorized as an extra cost)?

On the one hand, it makes sense if one takes into account the rumors of BBRY going software only. Still, can they sell the additional piece (the app)?

Interesting...

Yeah, it'll require BES 10, which itself is free. It's just a CAL cost that can be for BB, Android, or iOS now. My guess is that the app is free, just as the one they had for Mobile Fusion was, since it requires BES 10 to actually do anything with it.