However, there is still one place that Apple cannot full penetrate; this is the enterprise market. Now you will hear about this company or that buying iPads and issuing them to their executives, but on the whole many corporations will not allow them to connect to their corporate networks. The same can be said for the iPhone. I have worked at several that outright banned the devices due to concerns over security (and we are not even talking about Siri here).

Samsung, one of Apple’s leading rivals, has decided to do something about this and in an effort to push past Apple in the enterprise market (as well as the consumer market) they are working to develop new devices based on a “SAFE” set of standards. SAFE stands for Samsung Approved for Enterprise, which simply means that they have increased security, improved the ability of the phone to handle IT policies (policies which block apps or even certain types of apps from working or being installed).

With Samsung’s new SAFE Mobile Device Management IT departments can push and remove app, control access to the Google Store disable Bluetooth, WiFi, Camera, and a ton more to make sure that the wireless device is safe for use. The nice thing about SAFE is that while you are increasing security they have also extended other features under the same blanket. Support for Exchange has been extended to allow you access to features like OOR (Out of Office Reply, follow up flags, Lync Voicemails, Free/Busy Lookup, Reply/Forward status and even a full server search. These are things that the current version of mail on Android simply cannot do (nor can the version of mail on IOS either).

Samsung will have a SAFE version of the TAB as well as the Galaxy S III. These two devices are sure to look attractive to enterprise customers as Blackberry begins to be dated and more employees want a touch screen device for us with their work. It can also help with the problems of “BYOD” (Bring your Own Device). A company can require than they meet the SAFE (or other guidelines) before allowing them on to the network.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this affects Samsung sales in the enterprise world and how it will affect Apples small foothold in this same market.

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