Red Hat wasted no time in capitalizing on news about its mobile apps suite based on FeedHenry technology acquired last year.

Tuesday evening, just hours after announcing it’s going mobile, Red Hat disclosed a partnership for apps with Samsung, taking direct aim at the Apple-IBM partnership in the same arena.

Early reaction to the deal announced at the Red Hat Summit in Boston was positive even though Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is still new to the mobile space.

“The deal looks like a good one for Red Hat, aligning it with the world’s biggest smartphone maker to target a growing market for mobile apps in the workplace,” reported IT World.

“It’s less clear how much it will benefit Samsung, given that Red Hat is so new to the space.”

Tech news site The Inquirer in the U.K. heralded the news with this headline:

“Samsung and Red Hat join forces to rival Apple and IBM in enterprise mobile market”

Red Hat calls the agreement “a strategic alliance to deliver the next generation of mobile solutions for the enterprise. The alliance draws upon the combined strengths of each company – the breadth of Samsung’s mobile device portfolio fused with the depth of Red Hat’s open source middleware, mobile and cloud technologies – to deliver mobile solutions that enable rapid development and integration of enterprise applications for organizations moving toward a mobile-first strategy.”

The Inquirer points out that Apple iOS apps dominate the smartphone space with some 72 percent of the most recent applications. Android is second at 26 percent – and that’s the space where Red Hat-Samsung will play.

But Samsung, which battles Apple and Lenovo worldwide for market dominance in smartphones, apparently sees open source Linux-based and Red Hat-supported apps as a tool to combat for users looking to turn phones and other mobile devices into enterprise network access and utilization.

Insiders’ comments

Here’s how Craig Muzilla, senior vice president for Application Platforms Business at Red Hat, described the deal:

“Effective and successful enterprise mobility strategies take into account both platforms and devices, and how they come together to help enable powerful end-to-end mobile solutions. We believe deeply in the power of collaboration, and we’re excited to join with Samsung in not only delivering a new generation of mobile solutions for the enterprise, but in empowering customers to achieve new levels of innovation in mobile.”

Added Robin Bienfait, executive vice president, chief enterprise innovation officer at Samsung:

“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.”

The FeedHenry core

At the core of Red Hat’s mobile moves is FeedHenry technology.

“Red Hat is one of the only companies that can deliver and support the components needed to run the highly scalable workloads required by today’s digital business,” said Cathal McGloin, vice president of mobile platforms for Red Hat, in announcing the mobile apps move..

“The Red Hat Mobile Application Platform delivers vital mobile capabilities and secure, manageable integration with enterprise systems from a single, trusted, and award winning provider of enterprise middleware, cloud, and mobile solutions.”

Red Hat bought Ireland-based FeedHenry for $82 million last fall, and an executive told WTW then that the time had come for the Hatters to go mobile.

The Samsung deal makes the Red Hat move even more strategic.