CES: CIOs are powerless to stop Android's enterprise conquest, argues Samsung

LAS VEGAS: Enterprise CIOs and CTOs must prepare their company systems to securely run multiple platforms, including Android, if they want to protect themselves from cybercrime, according to Samsung's enterprise vice president Andrew Mills.
Mills made the claim during an interview with V3, arguing that trends such as bring your own device (BYOD) mean CIOs can no longer keep Android devices out of the company network.
"Enterprises have a growing issue facing them. Research shows that there will be three billion devices in the market by 2017. Of those, 45 percent [will be] in enterprise and 60 percent will be Android. We know Android will be in the enterprise whether businesses like it or not," he said.
The Samsung vice president said numerous companies are still taking a head-in-the-sand approach to BYOD, despite its growing prevalence in the enterprise space.
"We did some research on large and medium enterprises. We found a third had or assumed loss of customer data through BYOD, yet only 25 percent have done anything to update their policies on security," he said.
Mills said that while it is troubling, the trend does present several expansion opportunities for companies able to provide a solution.
"This trend is opening up security issues and a big number of CIOs have done nothing about them. This is bad but it also means there is an opportunity here for Android and Samsung," Mills told V3.
Mills highlighted Samsung's Knox security service as a key tool in the company's enterprise expansion plans. "We're fully aware CIOs have concerns about security and fragmentation of Android, but Knox is a platform that makes Android the safest operating system out there, it is a game changer for us," he said.
Mills said the company has already seen great interest in the Knox platform. He declined V3's request for comment on how many Knox customers it currently has, but confirmed that Samsung has been approached by a number of ex-BlackBerry customers.
"It's an obvious play to go to CIOs looking for an alternative to BlackBerry, but we've found we don't have to go out with the strong message that we're a BlackBerry replacement," he said.
"They want to bring us in. The issues facing BlackBerry leads to questions about the platform and we are finding strong interest from enterprise BlackBerry customers."
Despite the lack of knowledge about how many corporate customers are currently using Knox, the platform has been accredited by several government departments and agencies, including the US Department of Defense (DoD).
Mills said despite the platform's success, Samsung will continue to develop devices running other operating systems.
The news comes during a dark period for BlackBerry, which has posted back-to-back losses for several years now. Windows Phone heavyweight Nokia confirmed winning a number of customers from BlackBerry earlier in the year.