IBM Fills In Some "Pervasive" Details

IBM Corp. views the extension of E-business to "all manner of PDA and embedded devices" to be a huge market opportunity in excess of $100 billion in the next three to five years, up from about $10 billion now, said Steve Mills, general manager of IBM Software Solutions, Somers, N.Y.

To capture that wave, IBM is extending its middleware and other software to support such devices. The company already offers a "transcoding" layer of software to render current-day applications typically seen on 12-inch or larger monitors and render them for the new class of devices.

Other key development efforts: DB2 Everywhere, a version of the company's popular database is in beta, a version of MQSeries message queuing middleware is due to beta next quarter. Later in the year, the company hopes to bring WebSphere client proxy to the market.

The Pervasive Computing group at IBM cuts across many groups and divisions but is headed by Phylis Porio, director of marketing. Porio and Mills outlined the plans at PC Expo this week.