Samsung and SAP partner to create enterprise apps for wearables

sincity · November 11, 2014

Samsung and SAP are partnering to create a host of CRM apps for wearable devices.

The two tech giants have been working together to create enterprise mobility apps for mobile devices and wearables for the retail, oil & gas, healthcare and financial services industries.

The partnership will combine Samsung hardware, the Android platform, SAP mobile applications and the SAP HANA cloud platform to create tools that can help organizations create custom business apps. The tools are also designed to help businesses gather data on employee usage and performance.

The applications will be built to help SAP clients take advantage of Samsung features like the S Pen, Multi Window mode, voice recognition, sensing technologies and Air Gesture to improve operations.

Use cases

SAP says retailers can use the tools to help employees enhance customer experiences. The applications SAP envisions would enable retail workers armed with Samsung Gear S devices to access customer data, look up product information, conduct inventory searches, all within the device. SAP says a prototype is currently in the works for this use case.

For the oil and gas industry, SAP envisions an application that can help field workers use gesture commands to flip between screens, and a voice-command simultaneous window launch, so that users don’t have to touch the screen of their tablets with dirty hands.

These are just a few of the use cases SAP believes the partnership with Samsung can help deliver.

Reminiscent of Apple and IBM?

The announcement is similar to Apple and IBM’s recent partnership, is designed to bring more iOS devices and solutions to the workplace. The exclusive partnership will infuse IBM's data and analytics prowess into the iPhone and iPad. As part of the deal, IBM will develop more than 100 industry-specific apps developed exclusively for Apple's mobile devices, including native applications.

However, SAP and Samsung have upped the ante by introducing wearables into the equation. So far, Salesforce has been the most aggressive CRM and data manager to begin helping organizations develop applications for wearable technology.