Samsung’s Big Endorsement For Wearables In The Workplace

It’s still early days for wearables, but Samsung is betting big on enterprise use. The technology maker believes wearable technology will soon become a must-have that changes how and where work is done.

According to a new white paper titled “Wearables Make Their Move to the Enterprise” from IDG and Samsung Business, crafting a strategy to support wearables is a priority for the majority of businesses’ technology decision makers over the next 12 months. Almost a third of those surveyed ranked the task as “critical” or “high” priority. Research firms are also bullish on the growth of wearables in the workplace. ABI Research projects an $18 billion market before the end of the decade, according to the white paper. Research and Markets is even more optimistic, estimating the wearable technology industry will likely be worth $70 billion by 2025.

Samsung already offers a series of wearable products including the Gear S, Gear Circle and Gear VR. While the white paper does not reveal any specific details on how (or if) its products will be redesigned for B2B use, Samsung said in its official Samsung Electronics blog SamsungTomorrow that it has teamed up with SAP to pair their wearable devices with the SAP Mobility platform across multiple sectors. In the financial sector, for example, the two companies are working on customer-facing mobile banking solutions. Health care workers could soon use the virtual reality Samsung Gear VR to view CT or PET scans in an immersive 360 degrees.

The Internet of Things vision will also play a major role in the future of wearables at Samsung. The company plans to make 90 percent of its products IoT-compatible by 2017, and to have every product they produce connected and sharing data within the next five years.

Apple is Samsung’s main competitor in the enterprise wearable space. Consumers may have made up the majority of the reported 1 million pre-orders of the device. But business is also taking the device seriously, developing apps that extend beyond calendar and meeting notifications. From expense management tools to corporate travel management and health care, software makers have taken a renewed focus to developing enterprise-ready mobile apps, and see the value in adapting these solutions to wearable devices.

Still, excitement about a new technology doesn’t guarantee success. Google Glass launched to great fanfare, but was never able to find its place in the consumer or enterprise marketplace and the project officially ended in early 2015. A B2B-focused approach to wearables may face an easier path to mass adoption. One reason: business-use cases are clearer. Wearables can also help businesses unlock what may be the most important currency in today’s world: data. Actionable data that is accessible with a simple glance at a wrist keeps communication possible when using a smartphone isn’t possible or safe, thanks to wearable’s hands-free design.

The push for wearables at work coincides with other trends in the workplace. Increasingly workers are becoming “desk-less.” Thanks to innovations like the cloud, the proliferation of smartphones and other Internet-enabled devices, work today is less dependent on location. Samsung’s white paper cites a recent report by PwC that found 77 percent of users saw benefits in wearable devices for boosting efficiency and productivity at work, and that for employees, wearables complement, not replace, the smartphone.

The next few years will likely be filled with trial and (some) error, but the ecosystem of wearable tech has the potential to mature, making these tools commonplace at the workplace. As Timothy Wagner, senior vice president of Samsung Business Sales at Samsung Electronics America, recently wrote, “As products evolve and new categories are developed, the list of business opportunities enabled by wearables will continue to grow, putting enterprises at the helm of innovation.”