alm Inc. is announcing today a deal for joint technology development and marketing with I.B.M. intended to increase the use of Palm hand-held computers in corporations and broaden the use of I.B.M.'s software development tools in the hand-held business.

The Palm-I.B.M. agreement comes amid some signs that hand-held computers are gaining corporate respectability as they are being purchased by technology managers and given to employees as devices to improve productivity in sales, operations and management. Until now, most hand-held organizers have been brought into companies by workers who had purchased the devices for themselves.

For Palm, the largest hand-held maker, the corporate market is potentially an important and sorely needed source of growth. But it must do well there to stave off competition.

Analysts say the latest version of Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system is tailored to connect with Microsoft's applications, including e-mail, word-processing and work-group software. Sales of Pocket PC-based hand-held organizers, made by Hewlett-Packard, Casio and others, trail well behind those based on the Palm operating system. Yet the corporate market could provide a path for Pocket PC machines to gain ground, analysts say.

"The deal with I.B.M. is an important endorsement for Palm in the corporate market," said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a consulting firm.

Under the agreement, I.B.M. and Palm will develop software applications for using Palm devices for instant messaging, as well as for managing and sharing data on corporate sales, inventory and manufacturing. And I.B.M. will resell to businesses Palm hand-held organizers specially configured with the software requested by each corporate customer. "That gives Palm a real presence in the corporate market," noted Kevin Burden, an analyst at the International Data Corporation.

I.B.M.'s WebSphere software will be used as the programming tool kit for developing these new applications, and they are intended to run with I.B.M.'s WebSphere Everywhere Access Server, which will be released later this year.

WebSphere competes with Microsoft's .Net technology as a software development tool kit. The more applications that are written with the WebSphere tools and that run on the Palm operating system, the more both I.B.M. and Palm will gain at Microsoft's expense.

Christopher Morgan, director of strategic alliances for Palm's solutions group, said he did not regard the agreement with I.B.M. as "a competitive thing against Microsoft." But he also said that "we're really out to capture that corporate software developer" and that developers often determined the software that won in the business market.