Red Hat and Samsung Electronics announced a strategic alliance to deliver mobile solutions for the enterprise. The alliance draws upon the combined strengths of each company – the breadth of Samsung's mobile device portfolio fused with the depth of Red Hat's open source middleware, mobile and cloud technologies – to deliver mobile solutions that enable rapid development and integration of enterprise applications for organizations moving toward a mobile-first strategy.

Samsung Business Services and Red Hat plan to deliver a series of enterprise-ready industry-specific mobile applications that will run on the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform and address workforce management and business tasks, such as business intelligence, field and customer service, inventory management and sales catalog, pricing, ordering, and invoicing. The applications will be designed so that they can optionally be customized and tailored to fit the needs of an organization’s needs. The mobile applications will run on Android and other operating environments via the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform, and will be configurable to integrate into common enterprise back-end systems.

Companies will be able to deploy the apps on Red Hat’s new mobile application platform, which Red Hat announced separately the same day. The initial phase of the alliance will be focused in the U.S.

The deal is similar to the one between Apple and IBM, though perhaps not as grand in scale. Apple and IBM have already pushed out almost two dozen industry-specific apps, and Apple has introduced new AppleCare plans tailored for businesses.