Palm Picks Up Assets of Be

Palm Inc. said Thursday that it would acquire the intellectual property and technology assets of Be Inc. and integrate that company’s engineers into Palm’s platform business.

Palm hinted in a statement that Be’s technology, which is a platform for Net appliances and other embedded devices, will help Palm expand its horizons.

“This move will help us expand the PalmOS platform into broader markets using their (Be’s) multimedia media and Internet expertise,” said Palm CEO Carl Yankowski. Palm said it purchased the assets for $11 million.

Palm recently announced it would create separate operational groups for its platform business, in which it licenses the Palm OS to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and for its handheld business. It also recently announced it will extend its licensing program to include OEMs that use ARM silicon.

Be CEO Jean-Louis Gassee will become an advisor to Palm, helping the company integrate the technology and engineers.

Palm also announced that long-time executive Alan Kessler will resign from Palm on Friday. Kessler was general manager of the Platform Solutions Group and has been an executive with Palm since before the company was spun off from 3Com last year. He will be replaced by Eric Benhamou, chair of Palm’s board of directors, who will assume the title of CEO of the group.

Kessler did not say what his future plans are other than that, “I’m ready to move on to a new challenge.”

Dave Haskin is the managing editor of InternetNews.com’s sister site, allNetDevices.