Deutsche Telekom has partnered with IBM to provide the US technology giant’s MobileFirst platform to its small and medium-sized business customers in Europe.

The Developer Garden powered by IBM Worklight cloud service will enable developers to rapidly and cost-effectively create HTML5, hybrid or native enterprise apps for all mobile platforms. By using the cloud, apps can be deployed more quickly with updates made available instantly.

Developers will be able to combine communication features from Deutsche Telekom, such as speech recognition and SMS, with Worklight capabilities that include geo-location.

The move gives Deutsche Telekom’s smaller business customers access to resources to create enterprise-grade mobile tools that they might not otherwise have had.

The operator’s Developer Garden programme provides software components, developer tools and APIs.

Rainer Deutschmann, senior VP of core telco products at Deutsche Telekom, said the partnership “enables us to offer new business models in the area of mobile app development and to unlock new value for our customers”.

US operator AT&T announced a partnership with SAP to bring the SAP Mobile Platform, which includes tools for app development, security and management, will be offered to AT&T business customers from the final quarter of 2013.