IBM and Nokia target suits on the move

IBM and Nokia have unveiled a variety of wireless products and services aimed at extending companies' technology infrastructure to mobile devices.

The products and services are designed to work on specific Nokia mobile phones and devices, allowing them to access email and address book information, synchronise calendars and access certain back-end applications.

They are built on IBM's Wireless Enterprise Delivery Environment, an open standards-based wireless ebusiness framework, as well as on its WebSphere infrastructure software.

The two companies demonstrated the new business tools at the 3GSM World Congress today in Cannes, France. They hope the products and services will provide compatibility with legacy systems, a strategy designed to allow companies to build on their existing IT investments.

IBM and Nokia also announced plans to jointly develop services using Nokia's mobile devices, including the Nokia 6800 and Symbian-based devices such as the Nokia 9210i Communicator. IBM said it intends to develop its WebSphere Everyplace Access client for the Symbian operating system. Symbian, backed by Nokia, Motorola and other wireless leaders, is one of several operating systems that helps create phones that blend the functions of mobile phones and personal digital assistants. Symbian's rival in the operating system market for smart phones is Microsoft, which has its own family of smartphone software.

The latest trend is to let workers use their mobile devices to connect to servers running web services. IBM and Nokia each began to focus on the strategy late last year. IBM in November unveiled a set of programming tools, its Web Services Toolkit for Mobile Devices, specifically designed to bring web services to mobile devices. Around the same time, Nokia released several tools and interfaces aimed at giving mobile phones a greater role within corporations. Some of the tools are designed to enhance security for workers connecting to corporate networks remotely, while others are meant to help manage privacy.

Separately, Nokia and Texas Instruments announced on Tuesday that they have extended their relationship to improve how the Nokia Series 60 Platform, a software for smartphones that Nokia licenses to other mobile-handset makers, works with TI's OMAP application processors.

Nokia also said on Tuesday that its first handset capable of video calls was on track for deliveries in the first half of 2003 and announced a series of deals seen as helping the mobile industry stave off advances from software giant Microsoft.

Nokia said it had already delivered around 10,000 of its third-generation (3G) handsets globally to operators and infrastructure vendors, including Vodafone, Orange, Ericsson and Nortel, making it one of the first major players to sell a phone in Europe running on the much delayed 3G technology.

By CNET News.com's Sandeep Junnarkar. Reuters contributed to this report