Red Bend Software, a developer of Mobile Software Management (MSM) solutions has partnered with Samsung to conduct enterprise trials of a dual-persona Samsung Galaxy S III smartphones starting in the second quarter of 2013 specifically for use in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs.
Both companies plan to show off a demo of the trial at the Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain this week. The Red Bend trial will seek out enterprises interested in supporting BYOD. The trial will use a Galaxy S III that runs two separate Android operating systems-one for personal use and the other for business use.
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This is not Red Bend’s first BYOD partnership. The company has also worked withBlackBerry the company’s Balance software, which helps employees use smartphones or tablets for work without risk to their privacy. Red Bend also developed a partnership wtih VMware on a split personality platform for devices.
Red Bend’s TRUE is the BYOD solution that turns a single mobile device into two virtual phones running on the same hardware, keeps an employee’s work life completely separate from his personal life, and permits different entities to manage each virtual phone securely over the air.
In the trial, Red Bend’s TRUE Solution for BYOD will ask employees to keep work life separate from personal life, and ensure personal content and data remains private from employers.
Jae Shin, vice president of Samsung’s B2B Alliance Group and Mobile Communications Division, said Samsung consumers have come to expect the same rich Samsung user experience they love, whether they are using a personal or business smartphone. Red Bend offers a smartphone solution for BYOD to meet these needs of employees, as well as those of IT managers.
Red Bend’s Type-1 mobile hypervisor runs directly on top of the hardware of each virtualized operating system. Since each operating system is completely isolated from the other, a security compromise of the personal OS does not affect the enterprise OS, according to the company.
Yoram Salinger, CEO, Red Bend Software, said collaborating with Samsung to offer a virtualized smartphone featuring dual personas is a major milestone. There is great anticipation in the market for a BYOD smartphone based on Type-1 hypervisors. This will drastically improve how IT departments support BYOD and how consumers seamlessly move between their work and personal lives using one device. Together, Red Bend and Samsung are making the next generation of consumer mobile devices secure for the enterprise.
This will not be the first time Red Bend and Samsung have worked together. In 2009, Samsung trusted Red Bend to make its mobile devices continuously better through Red Bend’s vRapid Mobile software for firmware over-the-air (FOTA) updating and vDirect Mobile software for standards-based device management. Then last year Red Bend became a Gold Member of Samsung’s Enterprise Alliance Program (SEAP). The goal of SEAP is to enable partners to create new revenue opportunities in the enterprise mobile business with Samsung products and solutions.
So if you install the same malicious app on both partitions then you’re screwed anyway. I fail to see how this is useful.