Sun Microsystems and the creators of the BlackBerry, Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM), will work together to extend enterprise applications and data to the one million users of the handheld device.

The partnership was announced Monday at CTIA Wireless 2004 and will leverage Sun's Java technology to deliver existing enterprise applications via Web services.

According to Sun, the relationship has Sun's developers working with RIM's developers and ISVs to ease the design and deployment of mobile enterprise applications.

Already a number of third-party vendors have created versions of its enterprise applications such as CRM, e-mail, and ERP based on the Java technology that runs on RIM's handheld device.

Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, delivered a keynote address earlier today and spoke proudly of Java's success as a platform to deliver wireless applications. McNealy claimed Java has defeated .Net, Microsoft's development platform for Web service-based applications. He also said 500 million applications based on Java exist today.

RIM's Plazmic subsidiary, also at the show, introduced the Plazmic Content Developer's Kit version 3.7. The kit allows developers to create interactive and animated content for BlackBerry applications. The tools generate content in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), an XML-based standard for rich media content.