Samsung’s loss is Google’s gain, with Injong Rhee announcing that he has accepting a position as ‘entrepreneur-in-residence’ with the latter’s cloud computing arm.

Rhee quit his position as Samsung mobile CTO in December after a six-year tenure with the company. He was an instrumental figure in some of the firm’s key tech efforts of recent years, having helped to develop its Knox security platform and its Samsung Pay mobile payments platform. He also headed the development of Bixby, the AI assistant platform upon which much of Samsung’s business strategy for the near future now depends.

Announcing his new position with Google in a post on LinkedIn, Rhee explained that he will work under the head of Google’s cloud computing business, and that that he aspires to coordinate the company’s various efforts in connected devices into “a concerted IoT story” for the company that will produce products for consumers and the enterprise.

The announcement comes amid a strengthening focus on hardware on Google’s part, with the company having launched its own smartphones and smart home devices in recent years, and announced the combination of its hardware and Nest smart home teams earlier this month. Meanwhile, excitement about the IoT more generally continues to build as a growing number of devices go online.

Sources: ZDNet, Reuters