Palm's lifeline splits in two

 

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Posted on 30 Jul 2001 at 13:02

Palm has announced a restructuring of its business operations into two parts.

At the end of last week, the company announced it will turn the Platform Solutions Group - which is responsible for the development of the Palm OS and its licensing - into a wholly owned subsidiary by the end of 2001.

The Platform Solutions Group will take some infrastructure and staff services from the Solutions Group, which will continue to make handheld devices and license the Palm OS from the subsidiary.

The Platform Solutions Group currently licenses the Palm OS to a number of handheld computer manufacturers - HandEra, HandSpring, Sony, Symbol and the Palm Solutions Group - and to smartphone manufacturers Kyocera and Samsung. Two further licensees were announced this year: Acer, which will develop Palm OS products for the Chinese market, and Garmin, a leader in GPS technology.

Palm CEO Carl Yankowski said that the company is, "eager to foster the independence of both of our businesses, and creating a separate subsidiary for our platform activities will allow us to bring greater clarity of mission, better serve licensees and, we believe, increase shareholder value longer term."

Last week we reported that Palm had signed up a number of the world's top chipmakers to license the Palm OS software onto silicon - for example, for the Intel StrongARM and Intel XScale, for the Motorola DragonBall MX1 and for the TI OMAP platform.

Essentially, Palm seems to be distancing itself from being a hardware company. Instead, it is looking to generate extra revenue from licensing out its technology. Much in the manner of Symbian - the maker of the EPOC operating system - which was originally formed from a consortium of mobile phone manufacturers.

Author: Simon Aughton