Palm continues enterprise march with BEA
Handheld maker Palm announced on Tuesday a long-term deal with enterprise software maker BEA Systems that continues Palm's push into the corporate market.
The two companies are working together to help developers create mobile applications that let customers access corporate information on Palm handhelds. Milpitas, Calif.-based Palm will create device-side software and work with BEA, based in San Jose, Calif., so that the software can be used with BEA's WebLogic Server 7.0 and WebLogic Workshop products on the server side. Palm's new Reliable Transport technology will provide a secure channel for sending data between the server and the handhelds.
"The deal is about making it easy for customers to extend enterprise applications to Palm handhelds," said John Kiger, director of product marketing at BEA.
The companies declined to comment on the financial terms of the multiyear deal. Judy Kirkpatrick, Palm's vice president of strategic alliances, said no parts of the relationship are exclusive. Kiger added that BEA also is working with Blackberry-maker Research In Motion, but BEA had no other partnerships to announce at this time. BEA has dedicated engineering, marketing and business development people working on creating mobile applications for the corporate world.
The BEA relationship is similar to the deal Palm struck with IBM in late July, with the exception that the deal with BEA is targeted at WebLogic developers. Palm had promised to have agreements with four enterprise software companies by the end of the summer, and BEA is the final partner of the group. The other three include software maker Siebel Systems, health care consulting firm McKesson and IBM.
The partnerships are a means of boosting handheld sales to big businesses.
Source: CNET News.com
For more information: www.palm.com
MobileInfo Comments and Advisory: Palm is trying
desperately to move into the enterprise handheld market. The four
partnerships with IBM, McKesson, Siebel and now WebLogic will help
to some extent. However these efforts will not substantially change
the enterprise adoption of Palm OS devices. Palm has to convince
serious enterprise developer community that it is a viable platform
for serious enterprise applications. These developers, application
development architects and their managers evaluate a number of
factors - device capability and development tool support are two
important ones in this list. Support in IBM's WebSphere and BEA's
WebLogic for Palm was a must to be considered seriously. Now it must
figure out what some of these applications (beyond email-based
messaging) want to do in the device and on the wireless network. The
new version of Palm OS and hardware will help Palm reduce the
gap between Palm and Pocket PC. But it will continue to be an uphill
battle. For simpler single-task field applications, Palm does have
an advantage. For complex enterprise applications, it will have to
look more like Pocket PC.
