IBM, Nokia Team on Symbian for Enterprise


Finnish phone giant Nokia and IBM are teaming up to deploy mobile enterprise applications for 3G mobile devices built on the Symbian platform.

IBM Global Services said it would act as a system integrator of Nokia’s Mobile VPN product geared for Symbian-based mobile handsets and devices such as Nokia’s 9210 Communicator handheld computer-handset hybrid.

The Mobile VPN products include Nokia’s Security Service Manager and Nokia’s Mobile VPN Client that comes on all of Nokia’s Symbian-enabled handsets.

The Mobile VPN product includes Nokia’s Security Service Manager (NSSM)
and Nokia Mobile VPN Client for secure over-the-air provisioning of Mobile
VPN client software and policies for Nokia’s Symbian OS-based mobile
handsets.

The announcement is a kind of gentle rebuke to Microsoft’s competing operating system for smart phones and mobile devices, which recently hit the market with the London-based Orange SA. But the collaboration between IBM and Nokia signals the wider reach of Symbian OS licensees, which Gartner Dataquest reckons account for more than 80 percent of mobile phone sales around the world.

In addition to Nokia, other owners of Symbian are Ericsson, Nokia,
Matsushita (Panasonic), Motorola, Psion, Siemens and Sony Ericsson.

IBM’s Global Services division is expected to help Nokia in designing and
deploying secure, wireless business applications for enterprises systems such as field force and sales force applications, wireless LANs and smart card applications.

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