Palm/BEA to provide developers with mobile tool kits

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August 27, 2002 (Computerworld) -- Palm Inc. continued its assault on the enterprise market today by announcing a strategic partnership with BEA Systems Inc. that will provide developers with tools to make it easier to build mobile applications with BEA enterprise development software.
Just last month, Palm signed a similar deal with IBM to develop a tool kit that works with IBM's WebSphere Everyplace Access middleware to produce mobile applications (see story).
Chris Morgan, director of strategic alliances at the Solutions Group of San Jose-based Palm, said the two deals will give Palm access to development platforms used by an estimated 70% of enterprise application developers in the industry. The enterprise application development market is led by BEA, also in San Jose, and IBM, each of which has a 35% share, Morgan said.
Palm plans to develop tools that allow developers to more easily build mobile applications within BEA Web Logic Server 7 and BEA WebLogic Workshop "without any knowledge of the Palm OS," according to Judy Kirkpatrick, vice president of strategic alliances at Palm Solutions Group.
Palm will provide tool kits that work as server-side controls acting as a bridges between the BEA environment and the Palm OS. The tool kit will include the Palm Reliable Transport architecture, which supports both connected (synchronous) and unconnected (asynchronous) devices, which are periodically synchronized with a database via a dial-up connection.
The Palm tools will be added to the BEA software at no additional cost to the user, Morgan said.
Palm will also provide developers with tools that work on Palm handhelds, including a Simple Object Access Protocol stack, C ++ and Java 2 Micro Edition software. Morgan said Palm hasn't priced the device software but said it would add "just dollars" to the cost of a Palm handheld, such as the m5415. That device currently sells for $399.
Bernie Schroeder, chief marketing officer at Stellcom Inc., a San Diego-based developer that uses BEA software, said the new Palm tool kit should make it easier to develop applications for enterprises that want to support mobile workers using Palm devices. In the past, Schroeder said, Stellcom has had to write custom software to support mobile users.
Craig Mathias, an analyst at Farpoint Group in Ashland, Mass., characterized the BEA and IBM deals as a plus for Palm in its battle with Microsoft Corp. and its Pocket PC platform for the enterprise market. But, Mathias said, Palm faces an uphill battle, because "we live in a Windows world, and the Pocket PC looks a lot like Windows."

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