Earlier this year, Samsung unveiled its Knox mobile security suite aimed at giving corporate IT buyers peace of mind when deciding to purchase Samsung’s brand of Android devices for their employees. The Wall Street Journal reports that the program has been a bust so far, however, as Knox has been “beset by delays and programming bugs, frustrating clients including the U.S. Defense Department.” The Journal says that Samsung executives are “privately” acknowledging problems with Knox and are vowing fixes.
The big issue, according to the Journal’s sources, is one of inexperience: Samsung has traditionally been a consumer electronics company that hasn’t had to worry much about corporate IT departments’ needs and has only been picking up talent in the mobile security realm on the fly. As one of the Journal’s sources notes, “Samsung never really had a service business” which means that “creating this new organization that specializes in selling software and services… took us longer than expected.”
Samsung’s early difficulties in the mobile security realm come as welcome news for BlackBerry, which has recently been making a broader push to establish itself as the world’s top cross-platform mobile device management company. That said, it would be unwise to count Samsung out entirely since a company that has enough money to spend $14 billion a year on ads certainly has the resources to develop a strong suite of mobile security applications given enough time.
