IBM last week introduced technology designed to ease the manageability of business applications and increase the productivity of mobile workers.
The company says its Workplace Client Technology--a set of downloadable middleware components that work with server-based applications--marries the power of local processing with the efficiencies of thin-client computing.
The Workplace Client environment features scaled-down versions of key IBM middleware components, including DB2 database and MQ messaging software. That lets devices, such as laptops and handheld computers, that launch business applications through a server perform some data crunching locally.
The technology could be a boon to road warriors. Armed with a scaled-down database, mobile devices that are disconnected from a corporate network would still maintain some functionality. A sales rep, for instance, could access customer data and update information once the connection is resumed. "This makes client devices a first-class participant in the creation of service-oriented architectures," IBM senior VP Steve Mills said at a press conference last week in New York.
IBM plans to tweak many of its Lotus applications to incorporate the Workplace environment. Lotus Workplace Messaging software and Lotus Workplace Documents, a document-management application, are the first products that IBM will adapt, with availability expected by the end of next month. IBM says it will charge business customers an annual fee of $24 per user for access to the rich-client middleware technology, in addition to the price of the application itself.
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