Palm Inks Purchasing Agreement With Navy

Palm Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif. has signed a purchasing agreement with the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in Charleston, S.C., a move that Palm executives said signals the company's increased concentration on government sales.

"What Sparwar represents is a translation from our consumer roots to broadscale federal and private enterprise sales," Carl Yankowski, chief executive officer of Palm, told Washington Technology. "We believe that federal and enterprisewide deployments will constitute 50 percent plus of our revenue over the next several years."

The agreement allows government agencies to buy the Palm.Net wireless service. Palm did not provide an estimated dollar value for the contract; but under the terms of agreement, any government agency can order Sparwar Palm.Net service, which provides Internet access to Palm VII handheld computers. Previously, billing was done through credit cards.

"In the past, agencies have struggled to navigate the government's purchasing path to Palm.Net wireless service. Now agencies can purchase Palm.Net services in a way that works with ... internal procurement processes," said John Inkley, manager for federal sales at Palm.

The Sparwar purchasing agreement is the latest in a number of government contracts undertaken by Palm. In separate work, Palm also provided SPARWAR with Palms and related services for ship inspections and other functions that can't be done with larger, more power-hungry laptops.

The Scott Air Force Base Family Clinic has been using Palms to replace more complicated, paper-based systems of patent data reporting. And Lincoln, Neb.'s animal control officers use Palm's mobile field service solutions to tap into databases while on the road.

"We started with individual mobile professionals who were using this device as personal information managers; we called that our backdoor enterprise," Yankowski said. "Now CIOs want to use the handheld for supply chain management and efficiency improvements."

Yankowski cited research from IDC, a subsidiary of the Boston-based International Data Group, an IT research company, that stated companies will pay for or reimburse more than 50 percent of all handhelds sold worldwide by 2003.

To help facilitate government sales, Palm has been particularly aggressive in developing partnerships with system integrators.

"We understand agencies have their favorite system integrators, so we want to be sure our services are available to as many as possible," Yankowski said. Palm works with SAP AG, IBM Global Services, Accenture Ltd. and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, among others.

"In the end of 1999, when I first joined, Palm corporate culture considered enterprise and government almost as an afterthought," Yankowski said. "In the past 18 months, it's gone from that to being looked at as one the largest business opportunities in the handheld space."