IBM on Tuesday announced several products and partnerships designed to port applications to wireless devices across a range of networks.
The new solutions, unveiled at 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, include a new framework as well as partnerships with several companies, including Nokia Corp., Sony Ericsson Inc. and Wavecom S.A.
The Somers, N.Y., company announced the Wireless Enterprise Delivery Environment, a framework for connecting wireless networks with each other and with enterprise systems. In addition, the company is building two Wireless Enterprise Labs, one in Raleigh, N.C., and one in LaGaude, France, which will be open to IBM business partners who want to build applications based on the Wireless Enterprise Delivery Environment. The new framework is similar to and linked tightly with the companys Service Provider Deliver Environment for carriers, officials said.
To encourage the development of enterprise wireless applications, IBM and Nokia announced that they are working together on secure wireless access to e-mail and calendar information as well as a variety of other applications, which the company demonstrated at 3GSM World Congress.
The companies also announced that they intend to develop software for several Nokia phones, and IBM announced that it intends to develop and deploy its WebSphere Everyplace Access wireless client for the Symbian platform. Symbian is Nokias primary choice of operating system for phones.
In addition, IBM has forged a partnership with one of Nokias chief competitors. Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB announced Tuesday that IBM Global Services is using Sony Ericssons P800 smartphone to help enterprises extend their corporate applications to wireless devices.
IBM also announced a partnership with Wavecom SA. The two companies demonstrated a joint solution that integrates IBMs messaging software with a wireless module from Wavecom. It allows data from any device with a serial interface to be transmitted over a wide-area network, converted to an enriched format, and sent to a variety of corporate applications using a publish/subscribe messaging model, officials said. The wireless modules can be integrated into devices ranging from vending machines to electricity meters, officials said.