As you might expect, the GSMA announced the winners of a long long list of awards at Mobile World Congress last week. The winners of the inelegantly-titled Best Mobile Security or Anti-Fraud Solution were Samsung SDS for the Samsung Mobile Security Management Suite. According to the announcement:
By combining Samsung SDS Nexsign, a highly secure multi-modal authentication solution that uses non-duplicative biometric data such as fingerprint, iris, voice, and facial recognition for convenient, reliable, and secure access to smart devices and applications, with Samsung SDS EMM, an enterprise mobility management solution for protecting and managing your mobile work environment from device management to application and data management, companies can keep their mobile devices secure without sacrificing convenience for their users.
People who actually read that quote may have noticed it did not make sense. Hopefully the panel of judges received a more coherent explanation of why this solution is good at doing whatever it actually does.
The Korea Times reports that Won-Pyo Hong, a senior Samsung executive, welcomed the award:
Samsung SDS was honored with the world-renowned award for its competence in mobile security that global companies are focusing on… We hope to be a good example for many domestic and international businesses that are keen to promote both security and user convenience.
And who can argue with that? Winning an award for being competent at mobile security is clearly a step up from apologizing for the inconvenience caused by exploding telephones and the embarrassment of a being caught in a massive bribery scandal.
You can see the complete list of award winners here.
Out of the 2,200 companies who exhibited at MWC17, Neural Technologies were one of a select few including Samsung to be shortlisted for a GSMA Glomo award. Sadly our particular category was the same one as Samsung… I suppose losing out to Samsung is not such a bad thing… a company that sells pyrotechnic handsets with a $170+ billion in revenue, $25+ billion in profit, $200+ billion in assets and a $220+ billion market value is not a bad company to be pipped at the post by…
Luke, I agree. Well done to you for being nominated. It is unhelpful to have massive firms with huge general-purpose security suites competing for attention with specialist providers of anti-fraud tech.
I’m repeating myself but I consider this to be a very poor category for an award because it has the ‘and’ in the middle of the name. If you need to use the word ‘and’ then you must recognize there is something called ‘security’ and there is something else called ‘anti-fraud’, so what stops you giving two awards for two distinct categories? And how are you supposed to compare one kind of solution to the other? It would be like handing out a film award for Best Comedy or Horror Movie. Or if the GSMA wishes to argue that security and fraud both involve managing risks to the telco, why not have a more general category for all risks, just like we might have a general category for Best Movie?
Well Put :-)