After its Galaxy Note 7 recall disaster, Samsung saw its profits dive 30 percent during the third quarter of 2016. Needless to say, the biggest smartphone vendor in the world is now looking to bounce back, and its latest acquisition should help move things along, at least in the long run. The South Korean tech giant has revealed that it has bought Tachyon, a mobile enterprise startup firm in an effort to further diversity its smartphone business.
Tachyon is a company that specializes in configuring mobile devices and making sure they are secure for business purposes. What Samsung is planning to do with its latest purchase is to fully integrate Tachyon into its enterprise solutions in order to provide a package for businesses with regards to the safe configuration of third party mobile apps on their Samsung handsets. Interestingly, before Tachyon was acquired by Samsung, it had actually done some business with the South Korean mobile manufacturer before. But with this latest deal, Samsung will likely be taking full advantage of the startup’s expertise on an exclusive basis.
Tachyon (which is a term used to refer to a particle that travels faster than the speed of light) began as part of Kaprica, an enterprise mobility solutions provider. Samsung’s interest, however, is solely on Tachyon and its specialty. As for Kaprica, will continue to work with Samsung occasionally, on account of its status as one of Samsung’s Gold Level partners.
Although both Samsung and Kaprica have decided not to publish the specific financial terms of the acquisition deal, the former has stated that it will be taking on several parts of the business. Which parts exactly? These include the entire workforce of Tachyon and the whole customer base of Tachyon as well as the tech and related IP. But wait -- who are the customers of Tachyon? They happen to include various agencies in federal law enforcement, the Department of Defense (DoD), health care organizations, and several vehicle fleets based in the United States and in Europe.
Before its acquisition of Tachyon, Samsung has already offered device configuration solutions for businesses, notably through its Knox mobile security service. As explained by Jongshin Kim, the vice president of Global Mobile B2B team at Samsung, what the Knox service provided was the ability to facilitate broad automation of handset configurations, wherein settings could be accessed by way of an application program interface (API). As good as this approach is, Tachyon’s expertise in device configuration should further simplify and speed up this process.