Leveraging its dominance in the enterprise computing market, IBM Corp. formed a string of partnerships with leading wireless industry players designed to speed the growth of wireless Internet and e-business solutions for enterprise customers.
The core of the computing giant’s strategy is to give its enterprise customers the ability to extend their content to wireless networks and devices by whatever means the customer chooses. In line with that goal, IBM introduced its WebSphere Everyplace Server Suite, which corporate clients may use to develop wireless extension services in-house, and at the same time partnered with Nokia Corp., Motorola Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. to develop a carrier-based approach using the same technology. In addition, IBM is co-developing handset solutions with L.M. Ericsson, Palm Computing Inc., Intel Corp. and the Symbian initiative.
According to Jon Prial, marketing director of IBM’s Pervasive Computing division, IBM wishes to provide what he called the “plumbing” of a wireless Internet, known more specifically as middleware.
“This is allowing our enterprise customers to extend their applications out,” he said. “It’s really about the applications. We want to let our customers focus on that and we’ll mask the means of doing so.”
The WebSphere server software is a collection of different tools or ingredients residing between the application server and the device which businesses, applications developers and Web integrators can use to extend data to a variety of devices.
“It’s middleware that sits on top of the operating system and enables functionality to run applications,” Prial said. “In this case, the application is the support of pervasive devices.”
It essentially translates data into a form appropriate for a specific device. The suite includes the WebSphere Transcoding Publisher and Tivoli Subscription Manager, with data synchronization capabilities and Wireless Application Protocol functionality.
Corporate customers that wish to extend enterprise applications to their mobile work force alone can buy the WebSphere Suite and develop an in-house extension service independent of a carrier.
But other companies, such as dot-com firms, may want to extend their Internet content and services wirelessly with the help of wireless carriers.
“When you want to open your site to the world via Internet services, you turn to the carriers to manage the scale,” Prial said. “There’s never a single answer. You can architect various levels of scale. We need to make sure, as a vendor who’s agnostic, that we can enable them all and grow the market.”
Hence the deals with Motorola, Nokia and Cisco. The goal is to create a scalable network architecture integrating voice and data technology from Motorola’s Mobile Internet Exchange platform with the short message service functions of Nokia’s Artus Messaging Platform and elements of IBM’s WebSphere suite. IBM then will market this solution to carriers, which in turn can use it to offer specialized services to business customers.
“It builds upon IBM’s expertise to understand what is needed to deliver enterprise applications to customers on IBM’s Unix platform,” said John Steadman, vice president of business development and strategic alliances for Motorola.
“Operators are accustomed to selling the enablement of wireless voice and the early enablement of wireless data elements,” Prial said. “Now they’re looking to enable the wireless enterprise … We’re enabling them to build their own wireless portals. We do not offer a wireless portal because we don’t compete with our customers. We grow their ability to do so.”
Newcomer wireless portal provider GiantBear.com said its portal, to launch March 31, will feature an all-IBM technology solution. Specifically, it features IBM’s RS server, DB2 Universal Database and WebSphere Transcoding Publisher.
The WebSphere suite initially will be available for IBM’s AIX and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris from Sun Unix systems, with support for Linux and Windows 2000 systems added later in the year.
While it works to extend enterprise applications to wireless networks, IBM at the same time made moves to give the next-generation of wireless handsets the computing power needed to run these applications offline.
Currently, Internet applications can be used only when the phone is connected to the Internet via a browser.
Next-generation phones with more sophisticated operating systems, such as Symbian EPOC and wireless Palm OS computers, can connect to the Internet wirelessly or otherwise and download applications, so they may be manipulated offline. IBM is working with Ericsson, Palm and Symbian to create the necessary applications that will allow this on their respective platforms.
Specifically, Symbian and IBM agreed to open a joint development center in Yamato, Japan, to integrate IBM enterprise software like the DB2 Everyplace database manager with the Symbian platform.
“Let the customer focus on the application, not the device,” Prial said.
While the WebSphere product suite is available today, Prial doesn’t expect carriers to introduce commercial services resulting from it until later in the second quarter and beyond.
