Intel Corp. announced Tuesday morning that it will use IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace middleware as the embedded software for its Personal Internet Client Architecture (Intel PCA) for wireless devices and Internet appliances. Intel said the two companies will jointly develop hardware and software for next-generation, Internet-ready devices, and target makers of hand-sets, software publishers, and wireless carriers.
IBM’s WebSphere will be ported to Intel’s wireless processors, including StrongARM and future processors based on the XScale microarchitecture. Intel will distribute IBM’s middleware with its PCA software developer kit.
According to Intel, embedded middleware manages communications, enables content and service creation, and processes transactions between a wireless device and a back-end server. Application developers can use the middleware to write applications across multiple devices.
Intel said its agreement with IBM will provide a common standard that can be used on wireless devices and Internet appliances from different manufacturers.
The ability to work across multiple platforms has become more important as the wireless industry has grown in the past few years. Compared to the wireless market, the PC industry settled on a few standards at a relatively early point in its development.
By the mid-1980s, the vast majority of the PC market was using IBM- compatible systems running Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system and Intel’s 80286 and 80386 processors. By the early 1990s, the market had standardized on Microsoft’s and Intel’s successor products, Windows and the Pentium. No comparable standards have yet emerged in the wireless market.