NEW DELHI, INDIA: According to a recent report from IBM's Institute for Business Value, the number of mobile Internet users worldwide is projected to approach 1 billion, a 191 per cent increase from 2006 and a compound annual growth rate of 24 per cent.

Also, 67 per cent of all workers today use mobile and wireless computing. "This kind of market growth makes the provision of software for mobile devices more important than ever," said Shawne Robinson, product manager.

To capture this market demand, IBM is combining its software, services and research expertise to develop new mobile products and services. It includes products with business intelligence, collaboration, social networking and business performance capabilities.

In addition, IBM is providing developers with new tools to make existing software applications run on mobile devices. These new offerings can help individuals make better business decisions faster, while connecting friends, work colleagues and teams, IBM said.

IBM has announced Mobility@Work, a consulting service designed to help with integration of customer relationship management tools and other software for mobile collaboration between members of a work team or company.

"The program has been under wraps for six months. But with the attention to mobile-device security, new mobile devices, and considering how companies are trying to save money on energy lately, we felt it was time to announce the initiative," said Jan Walbridge, IBM spokesperson.

Another new offering by IBM is Rational Host Access Transformation Services (HATS), a software that helps developers to transform green screen applications into a mobile user interface and web services allowing end-users to access mainframe applications from a mobile phone, PDA or other remote mobile device in a highly secure manner.

A new software product, Rational Business Developer, helps developers create web 2.0-style applications in IBM's newest business language, Enterprise Generation Language (EGL), to run on a mainframe or mobile devices.

EGL makes it easy for developers to build new applications, like mobile web applications, or extend existing applications without having to be familiar with the underlying middleware or platform technologies.

IBM has also announced WebSphere Business Monitor software, which is designed to allow business managers to monitor business processes, such as sales in progress. The software includes client software that resides on each mobile device and communicates information to a dashboard that a business manager can access in a central office.

The software is now available for BlackBerry devices and will be available for the iPhone in the fourth quarter of 2008.

"The mobile web presents one of the largest emerging market opportunities we have seen in a decade as billions of people look to access a wide range of services both for business and personal use," said Drew Clark, director of strategy, IBM Venture Capital Group.

"Utilising software assets from IBM Research combined with our services offerings provides unique opportunities to help companies quickly adapt to the mobile environment," he added.