Handspring has announced new sales, marketing and distribution programs targeted towards enterprise and small to medium business customers.

The company said it is responding to increased interest from the corporate sector in the Treo family of products by combining the Treo with a productivity applications like email, sales-force automation, customer relationship management as well as development and inventory tools. Treo is a device that integrates a mobile phone, wireless applications like email and Internet browsing, and a 16MB Palm OS organizer.

Plans for expanded sales, marketing and distribution programs include increasing the company's enterprise sales force, establishing training programs for key partners and extending the distribution network. Through an arrangement with MarketLink, Handspring said it is dramatically increasing its enterprise sales team from its core staff to a nation-wide sales force. The new representatives will work together with distributors, value-added resellers, enterprise solutions partners and carrier sales teams from Cingular and Sprint to sell the Treo family of products to prospective customers.

Handspring has also expanded distribution with CDW-G, the government sales arm of CDW Computer Centers, a leading provider of multi- brand products and services and Global Wireless Data (GWD), a single source value-added stocking distributor of wireless data communication products and integration services to channel partners, software developers, systems integrators and value-added resellers.

The company said increased marketing activities include a series of training initiatives around the benefits and capabilities of mobile voice and data products and participation in key industry events targeted at IT managers and corporate decision makers.

It appears the company would like to see these new initiatives pump up the sales of its new Treo family, which, though they've been recieved positively, have not been flying off the shelf. A serious push into the corportate market could be just what the doctor ordered for Handspring, as the company's position as the number two PDA vendor behind Palm Inc. is tenuous at best with Sony and its consumer focused Clie line of Palm OS PDAs practically tied for second and Hewlett-Packard coming up quickly from behind with the Pocket PC iPAQ series.