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IBM is making no secret of its ambitions to bring Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise and out to the mobile workforce, under its own banner.

Big Blue announced yesterday it's placing its Lotus communication and collaboration tools portfolio on Research In Motion's BlackBerry, making the smartphone the lone enterprise device to provide mobile access to all major Lotus collaboration solutions.

The Lotus Collaboration Software suite for BlackBerry provides social networking software from IBM Lotus Connections, collaboration tools from Lotus Notes and unified communications (UC) features from Lotus Sametime.

IBM isn't the only application vendor that appreciates the BlackBerry market base. Just a week ago SAP announced it was natively integrating its CRM application into the BlackBerry, providing users full access to all of SAP CRM's functionalities.

Connectivity and communication wherever and however is a growing requirement for businesses. More workers are relying on mobile devices for that capability. Juniper Research predicts that 4.2 billion people will own mobile devices by 2013.

Meanwhile, Research firm Strategy Analytics predicts 290 million mobile handsets will be sold this quarter, an increase of 12 percent compared with the second quarter of 2007.

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