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Sybase CEO John Chen remembers the doubts that swirled around his company when it first began to focus on helping enterprises manage and mobilize data several years ago. At the companys annual TechWave conference, Chen assured Aug. 7 attendees that the companys decision was paying off.
“Patience is a little bit of a virtue here,” Chen said during his keynote speech, in Las Vegas.
Today, the company can boast of a network of more than 700 mobile operators and originating 60 percent of all the domestic SMS (Short Message Service) traffic in the United States. In the year since the last TechWave conference, the company acquired Mobile 365, much to the initial chagrin of skeptical analysts and shareholders, Chen said. But the move is all part of the companys overall vision, he said.
“We want to be No. 1 in enterprise mobility, and these are the abilities you must have,” he said.
At this years TechWave, Sybase is highlighting the progress of its Unwired Enterprise strategy, as well as how it plans to take mobility to the next step by simplifying the development of mobility tools to reach beyond the enterprise to the consumer, and delivering broader and deeper business intelligence for real-time use.
Sybase officials have a host of announcements planned for the week-long conference, including revealing plans to expand its Unwired Enterprise initiative, which is focused on helping organizations effectively manage and mobilize data.
The next generation of its mobility architecture is aimed at further streamlining the development and deployment of mobile enterprise tools, helping to overcome the challenges of mobile environments and empowering companies to build leading-edge mobile solutions, company officials have said.
The company announced plans to make the Sybase platform provide a flexible, open and standards-based infrastructure enabling companies to optimize and enhance the infrastructure they already own. Advances in the platform will target a number of key areas, such as providing a uniform way to access heterogeneous data sources.
Mobile middleware services will bridge the middleware gap between enterprise data and mobile devices in development and development environments, and device services will provide a uniform interface for developing and deploying applications across a range of device platforms, officials said.
In addition, the company also announced its partnership with mobile device maker HTC (High Tech Computer). The alliance will focus on the management and security features of the Sybase Information Anywhere suite. The companies have pledged to work closely together for the purposes of making device management and security stronger and smoother on the Windows Mobile devices that HTC specializes in.
Chen said he is very excited about the journey his company is on, and the momentum of the mobile market is building. Statistics show that about half of the worlds population uses mobile devices, he said.
“We are the largest enterprise software company that is executing this particular vision,” he said in his remarks. “The vision was enabling enterprises to connect with everywhere they do business, everybody and anytime they would like to reach them.”