A Sybase Move Toward Mobile Growth

Sybase plans to give its developers and partners a preview of future
plans at its TechWave
conference today in Las Vegas. The company also plans to
announce a global alliance with HTC, a leading provider of Microsoft Windows
Mobile “smart” devices, such as T-Mobile’s Dash.

Sybase’s long-term “Unwired Enterprise” mobile initiative will be top of mind at the
conference today as the company previews advances planned for release next
year and into 2009.

“The key benefit is going to be improved interoperability between all
these mobile devices,” said Rob Veitch, senior director of business
development at Sybase. “We want to be proactive about this, share road maps
and work together on things we know to be issues.”

Sybase will discuss data services
that provide a uniform way to access heterogeneous data sources, ranging
from structured and unstructured data to pre-packaged applications.

Also up for discussion are mobile middleware services that act as a bridge between enterprise data and mobile devices in development and deployment
environments.

Device services, which will provide a uniform interface for
deploying applications across a range of device platforms, are also on the schedule, as is a unified application development tool for linking
enterprise data sources and processes.

Finally, the company will preview an administration
console designed to give IT a single view to help manage, secure and deploy
mobile data applications and devices.

Sybase is involved in a number of large mobile deployments, including one
with the U.S. Census Bureau that involves 500,000 users.

Veitch said Sybase
wants to help IT better manage the growing interest and reliance on mobile
devices in the enterprise. To that end, he said Sybase has completed testing
and is ready to validate virtualization technologies with its Information
Anywhere suite of mobile management and security technology.

“Mobile is moving from a tactical to a strategic entity in the IT space,”
Veitch told internetnews.com. He noted that the growth of mobile
applications on the front end, at the device level, means there is a
management challenge of implementing the right software and support in
backend systems.

He said Sybase’s ultimate goal is to become a one-stop-shop of tools that
simplify how mobile apps are built for any variety of device with a standard
interface for developers.

“We want to provide an integrated technology stack from end-to-end for
the unwired enterprise over the next 12 to 18 months,” he said.