Red Hat – Software Partnership Shakes Up Mobile Software Market

How’s a company supposed to keep expanding when they’re already king of the Linux server mountain? Develop a new mobile software stack, Red Hat Mobile Application Platform (RHMAP), and partner up with the world’s leading Android smartphone vendor, Samsung. Red Hat doesn’t intend to become just another Android app vendor though. The company’s focus will be on business, the cloud, middleware, and operating systems.

According to the companies’ joint announcement, Samsung and Red Hat intend to deliver a series of enterprise-ready, industry-specific mobile applications that will run on RHMAP and address key business tasks and workforce management like field and customer service, invoicing, ordering, and more. The applications will be designed so that they can be customized to fit the unique needs of an organization.

New tools and resources will also be provided to help build a new ecosystem of  developers and enterprise partners in an effort to promote rapid innovation that meet both current and emerging needs in mobility. Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), global delivery, integrated support for customers and partners, and other support services will be provided by the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform as well.

In addition to these features, Samsung and Red Hat are planning to actively engage in joint go-to-marketing activities for the solutions developed through their partnership. However, everything is being built around RHMAP. This platform  has an open and extensible architecture based on Node.js for client and server side mobile app development.

The Red Hat Mobile Application Platform provides developers with the flexibility to create native Android, Blackberry, iOS, and Windows Phone, HTML5, hybrid, or web apps. The platform also supports a wide variety of tool kits such as Apache Cordova, SDKs, Titanium, and more. The primary goal of RHMAP is to “simplify and accelerate the development, integration, deployment, and management of mobile solutions by allowing collaboration across development teams, such as front-end application developers, back-end IT integration, and DevOps teams.”

At this time, RHMAP is a beta project and “the initial phase of the alliance will be focused in the US.”