IBM pushes further into wireless internet

IBM this week put in place a series of initiatives and partnerships that give it an end-to-end mobile sales story, from servers and software to mobile devices and consulting.

Businesses will be able to integrate mobile devices with servers and enterprise applications, including customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and messaging.

"Wireless ebusiness is only going to match the analyst numbers when companies start pooling their expertise," said Ajei Gopal, chief technology officer at IBM's pervasive computing division.

However, the initiative does not represent a silver bullet for users, said Matthew Nordan, senior analyst with Forrester Research. "Customers should see this as only the start of a consulting relationship with IBM," he said. "Technologies like trans-coding are notorious for needing a lot of work."

IBM intends to develop a wireless infrastructure for service providers to offer to their customers through partnerships with Nokia, Motorola and Cisco. Alliances with Ericsson and Intel will focus on creating hardware, while a joint development centre with Symbian in Japan will work on integrating enterprise software with the Epoc platform for the lucrative Asian market.

IBM will also work with Motorola to build a voice and data engine that will allow companies to develop real-time applications on smartphones.

Big Blue is releasing hardware to support the initiative. From the second half of this year, the Websphere EveryPlace Suite will allow organisations to deploy and integrate multiple mobile platforms.

The suite includes support for Internet and mobile protocols, data synchronisation and enterprise management, together with IBM's trans-coding functionality which automatically translates server data into a format that can be read by mobile devices.

In addition, IBM Global Services will offer Quickstart, a consulting service for customers rolling out mobile commerce.

Royal Bank of Scotland and Safeway are working with IBM on consumer applications based on wireless application protocol (Wap). These services will be branded by IBM and sold on to Internet service providers, Gopal said.

The deal is IBM's second major push into the European wireless market this year, following a move to coordinate an alliance for Internet services from telco Vodafone AirTouch.