Raymond Chandler has had a busy night at the restaurant he works for in Cincinnati, USA. It was yet another day where large groups of customers streamed in for dinner. But Chandler was not worried too much, as he did not have to make too many trips to the kitchen to place the numerous food orders. He takes the orders, punches them into his handheld device, which delivers it instantly to the kitchen. Within minutes, he knows when the orders are ready on his handheld device and he promptly spreads the table for the customer. The customer waiting time is less this way and the restaurant is able to accommodate more customers per table. All thanks to a little piece of software called mobile database from Sybase. The mobile database software runs effortless, with almost no technical support. And every employee in the restaurant is equipped with a wireless handheld device.

At another location, field service representatives of Northeast Utilities don’t have to carry huge packets of manuals while they are on call to restore faulty power transformers. They view the diagrams of the circuits on their handheld devices, which store these on a mobile Sybase database.

Welcome to the world of the ‘unwired enterprise’.

A Fast-growing Niche
The mobile database is the core around which this new concept is built. It is a niche market now, worth just $90 million in 2002 but expected to grow fast. And Sybase is the current leader with nearly two-thirds of the market and is making a number of deft moves to further consolidate its position. Sybase runs the world’s largest mobile Internet service with eight million registered users of AvantGo.

"The next wave of spending in information technology will come from mobility and information sharing. So all our products will support the migration to this," said Sybase chairman, president and CEO John Chen while unveiling his company’s aggressive consolidation drive in the segment through the ‘unwired enterprise’ initiative. The initiative was launched at the Sybase Asia-Pacific User Conference at the Grand Hilton in Seoul on November 6, 2003.

Sybase has been working on this initiative for five years. However, things fell into place when Intel took the lead by introducing the Centrino-based Wi-Fi protocol in early 2003. "Computing should be anytime, anywhere," emphasized Chen. He is buoyed by the recent Intel statement that predicts the ‘unwired enterprise’ market will be bigger than the Internet market in a few years.

"We are enabling enterprises to bring mobility to all applications and help the unwiring of data from huge centralized corporate databases so that it could be used at any point, any time irrespective of its storage location," said Thomas Volk, Sybase’s executive V-P for the infrastructure platform group. A mobile database removes some of the major problems associated with how and where to store information for people working in the field. Data downloads from a modem is cumbersome and wireless systems often face blackouts. A mobile database shares information back and forth between a mobile device and a stationary corporate database.

Tapping Indian Talent
Like many other global companies, Sybase Inc. too has finally fallen for the charms of India’s software segment. The company recently announced its plans to open a software development center in Pune. It has earmarked an investment of $ 8 million into this facility. In an exclusive chat with Dataquest, Sybase Chairman, president and CEO John Chen informed that the company had already signed a lease agreement for a facility in Pune and the interior decoration work was currently going on.

The software center is likely to be inaugurated in Feb 2004. "It will, however, reach its full planned strength of 250 professionals in 12 to 18 months time," Chen said. Sybase currently has a contract arrangement with The Chatterjee Group (TCG) of Kolkata to handle some software work. The arrangement started almost two years ago and at its peak had 45 developers. The facility is now working with around 22 professionals. Once operational, the Pune center is likely to absorb the work being done at the TCG premises.

Sybase has been among the last of the global software majors to set up a software development center in India. Its competitors like IBM and Oracle have had large software development operations in India for over five years. "It is never too late. Many other software companies had come to India mainly to leverage the low costs. We have come here to service the local markets and make value-contributions," informed Chen. The strong database major has been slow to venture into the Asia-Pacific region. It set up a software facility in Singapore only in 1998. However, unlike the industry practice, Sybase handles the entire product development work at each of the offshore centers outside the US. The Singapore center has been in the forefront of developing its flagship Powerbuilder product.

With the Asia-Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong, the company has operations in 11 countries in the region. Early this year, it had set up a LG CNS Sybase solutions center in South Korea. In 2002, it started a China Solutions Center in Beijing, and an Asia Solutions Center in Hong Kong in 2000. These centers started with an average of 60 professionals. Currently there are some 700 employees working in the Asia-Pacific region.

Major users of Sybase in India such as HDFC Bank, Federal Bank, IBP Co Ltd, and the Center for Rail Information Systems (CRIS) are happy with the development. They hope that the beefed up presence of the company in India will offer enhanced technical support to Sybase users. The absence of large-scale technical support has been a sore point with the users even though all of them swear by the robustness of the products. "The Pune center is going to benefit our business in a big way and reassure our customers about the increased availability of technical support," said Sybase area V-P Horace Chow.

A small technical team at Mumbai has been providing bulk of the technical support to Sybase users here. Sybase has a ‘follow the sun’ policy where its globally distributed support centers divide the work among the appropriate geographies seamlessly.

With increased presence, Sybase is also mulling plans to entice students in engineering colleges to learn Sybase technologies at the college level itself. Sybase has already hired over 20 professionals in Pune. It is learnt to be taking the contract services route to staff the center.

Sybase’s new product portfolio
Participatory Business Intelligence: The company has introduced several products under this category, which allow companies to focus on solving business problems. Explaining the concept of ‘participatory business intelligence’ Dan Meers, president and co-founder, Inmon Meers Group, demonstrated how the product would enable users to conduct multiple iterations of query and analysis to get the view of information they need. The technology allows users to adjust their business intelligence delivery and usage to allow for differences in the timeliness and presentation format of information required based on their current needs.

Enterprise-class RDBMS: Sybase also announced the general availability of its new Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 12.5.1, the enterprise-class relational database management system (RDBMS). "The scalability and high performance of ASE 12.5.1 allows our customers to build, deploy and manage database applications on the most cost-effective platforms—including Linux on Intel, Windows and Unix," said Dr Raj Nathan, senior V-P and GM, Sybase Infrastructure Group. New capabilities in this RDBMS release enables customers using Sybase ASE 12.5.1 to affordably close today’s ‘operational gap’ created between the need to scale up to handle exponential growth in data volume/complexity and the need to control or reduce the cost of data management, including people, systems and applications.

ASE 12.5.1 includes new features to reduce operational costs, such as self-management, automatic resource management and transportable databases. These capabilities enable companies to handle new and increased demands for data access without significantly increasing DBA costs. "Based on our analysis of thousands of applications, the total life-cycle cost of most RDBMS applications will be, on average, more than 15% lower when running on Sybase ASE versus the equivalent offering from Oracle Corporation," said Joh Johnson, chairman, The Standish Group.

N SURESH in Seoul
The author was hosted by Sybase,Inc