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Lotus Helps Power Smartphones, IBM Says

IBM's Lotus Expeditor, which developers can use to create collaborative, desktop-style applications for client and mobile devices, is inside Sprint Nextel's Titan platform for most of its smartphones running Windows Mobile 6, IBM said last week.

Expeditor is also used in building some of IBM's own collaboration products, including Lotus Notes e-mail and Lotus Sametime instant messaging.

While IBM's plans are still nascent -- given that the agreement with Sprint Nextel regards only WM6 phones -- it hopes to strike additional equipment  deals with other phone makers and service providers, including Apple, maker of the red-hot iPhone, according to Bharti Patel, director, Lotus Client Platforms. "As we move forward, we would definitely be thinking in those directions," she said. "We want it to be widely, widely adopted."

Sprint Nextel first announced Titan in December. It is still in beta but a commercial version should be released later this year, Patel said.

IBM did not publicize its involvement until now, wanting instead to wait for a high-profile occasion like this week's EclipseCon event in Santa Clara, California, Patel said.

"We are intentionally blurring the lines between desktop and mobile development and allowing developers to easily move their applications to the mobile environment," Tom Moore, director of mobile business solutions at Sprint, said of Titan in a prepared statement.

Lotus Expeditor is based in part on OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative), a SOA (service-oriented architecture) programming model that Redmonk analyst James Governor recently dubbed as an "industry-changer."

"OSGi allows modules of Java classes to be loaded on demand," Governor wrote in a recent blog post. "There is no need to load the entire Java stack to run an application - just the runtime services it actually requires. OSGi therefore enables a more dynamic, less constricted Java, which partially explains its enthusiastic backing from major vendors such as IBM, BEA and Oracle."