Not all partnerships and alliances are created equal. Some are superficial, some are one-sided, and some are actually balanced and meaningful. A balanced partnership is the rarer of those types, but when they happen, magic can happen.

Today, a partnership comes to light that has many in both the Enterprise and open source communities excited. Two powerhouses -- Red Hat and Samsung -- are forming an alliance for mobile Enterprise solutions. Will this partnership be balanced and meaningful? It looks very likely.

"As the leader in enterprise mobile and open source solutions, Red Hat brings flexibility, community credibility, and world-class support for application development and deployments on premise and across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Building on its leading position in consumer products, Samsung Business Services, part of Samsung Electronics America, Inc., provides a diverse portfolio of technologies targeted for business from smartphones to wearables, tablets, digital displays, hospitality TVs and printers", says Red Hat.

Robin Bienfait, executive vice president, chief enterprise innovation officer, Samsung explains, "we are excited to collaborate with Red Hat to deliver the next generation of mobile enterprise applications and solutions, and are committed to shaping the future of innovation. Samsung firmly believes that strategic alliances with organizations such as Red Hat that deliver open source enterprise infrastructure and provide reliable, secure integration from the back end to the end user will help businesses more readily adopt a mobile first environment".

Both companies share their following plans.

Business applications: A series of enterprise-ready industry-specific mobile applications that will run on the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform and address key workforce management and business tasks, such as business intelligence, field and customer service, inventory management and sales catalog, pricing, ordering, and invoicing. The applications will be designed so that they can optionally be customized and tailored to fit the needs of an organization's unique needs. The mobile applications will run on Android and other operating environments via the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform, and will be configurable to integrate into common enterprise back-end systems.

A series of enterprise-ready industry-specific mobile applications that will run on the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform and address key workforce management and business tasks, such as business intelligence, field and customer service, inventory management and sales catalog, pricing, ordering, and invoicing. The applications will be designed so that they can optionally be customized and tailored to fit the needs of an organization's unique needs. The mobile applications will run on Android and other operating environments via the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform, and will be configurable to integrate into common enterprise back-end systems. A developer ecosystem: Tools and resources to build and nurture a new ecosystem of enterprise partners and developers to promote rapid innovation and availability of solutions that meet both current and emerging needs in mobility.

Tools and resources to build and nurture a new ecosystem of enterprise partners and developers to promote rapid innovation and availability of solutions that meet both current and emerging needs in mobility. Support services: Integrated support for customers and partners, Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), and global delivery and support services for the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform. Business collaboration: Red Hat and Samsung Business Services plan to actively engage in joint go-to-market activities for the solutions developed through the alliance.

This deal is reminiscent of Apple's partnership with IBM. With that said, this deal arguably has much more potential -- it is not limited to the small market share of iOS. It could be a true game-changer.

Are you excited about this partnership? Tell me in the comments.

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