The Palm platform maintains a slim lead in the stagnant PDA market worldwide, and it tops the nascent smartphone market in the United States—with handsets from palmOne, Samsung and Kycoera. The platform barely causes a ripple in smartphone sales overseas, however. The Symbian OS, backed by the likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson, dominates smartphones everywhere but the U.S. Also, many companies still view Microsoft's mobile platform as more enterprise friendly.

To layout the case for the Palm platform, PalmSource President and CEO, David Nagel, will present at the Gartner ITXPO Symposium and in Orlando, Florida today. According to the company, he plans to show how Palm PDAs and smartphones can deliver enterprise-grade solutions for mission critical mobile business application deployment.

Demonstrated solutions will include PalmSource Mail for BlackBerry Connect—which brings Blackberry push-based email and data connectivity to Palm-based handhelds and smartphones—and IBM WebSphere Everyplace Connection Manager for Palm OS, a mobile Virtual Private Network (VPN) that encrypts data and allows mobile users to roam seamlessly and securely between any wired or wireless network on a Palm device.

Nagel asserts that "We believe PalmSource's strength as a leading mobile platform and wireless solutions provider will foster growth for the entire Palm Powered economy looking to capitalize on the burgeoning enterprise market. By delivering an enterprise-grade operating system and aligning with industry-leading partners such as IBM and RIM, PalmSource is further strengthening its leadership position in the enterprise market."

Announced at the Company's second annual Euro DevCon last month, PalmSource is making available to Palm OS software developers the e-mail API that will be released with the first version of PalmSource Mail for BlackBerry Connect. The e-mail API lets developers leverage BlackBerry e-mail transport to create mobile data applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), sales force automation (SFA), supply chain management (SCM) and mobile field services for the enterprise environment on Palm smartphones and wireless devices.

In addition, PalmSource is collaborating with IBM to provide Java technology for Palm OS and make it available to Palm OS licensees and software developers. As part of this collaboration, PalmSource licensed IBM's WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment Java 2 Micro Edition certified runtime environment for integration into the Palm OS and IBM's WebSphere Studio Device Developer.

Also part of PalmSource's assault on the enterprise is Palm OS Cobalt, which the company launched earlier this year. No devices running Cobalt have shipped yet, however. The new OS adds multitasking and multithreading; extensible communication and multimedia frameworks; better security and more to the platform.