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The company has announced a series of new products that it hopes will make it the choice for ISPs offering wireless access to the Net. It also hopes to attract companies wishing to connect PDAs and wireless devices to applications and networks.

The strategy is centred around two new products. The WebSphere Everyplace Suite Service Provider Edition provides a wireless gateway to support both wired and wireless networks, with features such as message queuing, sychronisation, personalisation and subscriber management for ISPs. IBM has already signed up firms such as BT Cellnet, Telecom Italia and Avenir as partners.

The second service, Superior Wireless Applications (SWAP), acts with the WebSphere Everyplace Suite to allow users to access business applications from devices like Palm Pilots or other PDAs. IBM is opening 68 additional hosting centre in the US and Europe to deal with demand for externally-hosted wireless solutions.