NEW YORK -- PalmSource on Tuesday unveiled its newest platform framework code-named "Sahara" as its mobile business architecture -- a strategy that CEO David Nagel says will translate into further acceptance of the Palm OS in the enterprise market.

Speaking at the inaugural CeBIT America conference here, Nagel explained that 80 percent of the people who buy devices, even if bought in retail channel, use them at work. In 2002, Palm still maintained the market share lead with 59 percent while Microsoft's Pocket PC had 30 percent and other OS vendors taking 11 percent.

"PalmOS is today the leader in the enterprise market," Nagel told the CeBIT crowd.

And to maintain that lead, Nagel said PalmSource is developing the new Sahara framework with four pillars that address the mission-critical needs of IT managers within the enterprise: security, messaging, information and management. The new framework comes less than a year after the formal introduction of Palm's next-generation OS 5 based on ARM processors.

But while OS 5 provides much greater processing capabilities than its previous 68K technology based on the Dragonball processor, the new "Sahara" initiative certainly addresses one of the greatest challenges confronting PalmSource from making further in-roads in the enterprise market. In fact, Palm in the past has lost out on enterprise opportunities like Disney due to concerns specific to large-scale IT departments.

"Security is the #1 concern" for enterprise IT executives, Nagel acknowledged.

Unlike the Palm OS 5 platform, Sahara will offer additional security through pluggable cryptography and verification, signed code, encrypted databases and files as well as enhanced messaging capabilities with back-end connection out of the box based on standards, Nagel said.

His speech comes as the Milpitas, Calif.-based innovator of handheld computing announced a deal with IBM (Quote, Company Info) to commit to the development of standards-based Web services (define) for Palm OS-powered devices. The deal expands upon the arrangement that its sister company Palm Solutions announced days ago at Sun's JavaOne show to integrate IBM's Websphere Micro Environment (WME), a Java-powered embedded runtime environment, into the hardware company's entire Tungsten line.