
With Samsung and Oracle forming a new partnership on mobile cloud, many are left wondering what their first collaboration will actually be? Although it has being reported that Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd met with Shin Jong-kyun of Samsung in South Korea last week, both Oracle and Samsung have declined to comment on the story.
A report in the Korea Times quotes an unnamed informant with knowledge of the meeting. The informant said, “As Samsung is the global leader in handsets, Oracle needs the Korean company to boost its database cloud solutions, which the U.S. company identified as one of its next engines.” The informant explains that Samsung intends to team up with Oracle so they can provide a better, more secure mobile cloud product at some point in the future.
Samsung is one of the biggest technology companies in South Korea. Samsung has an existing client database in the Korean retail, government and health care sectors. Samsung is an established name in Korean technology and it makes sense for them to want to team up with a major cloud player such as Oracle in order to deliver mobile cloud products.
Samsung has also been in the headlines recently as rumors swirled about Samsung potentially buying out Blackberry. While Samsung has recently forged partnerships with Microsoft and SAP, the Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung isn’t interested in buying out Blackberry. Some analysts aren’t believing that story, pointing to the meetings with Oracle as evidence of Samsung’s interest in Blackberry.
The idea is that while Blackberry’s popularity is waning, it still has pretty large customer base that it works with regularly. If Samsung and Oracle could bring Blackberry into the fold, they could gain access to their customer base and potentially pitch them on a new mobile cloud product. That’s pure speculation, of course, but all we can do is speculate when such little information has been publicly discussed by both Samsung and Oracle.