Unwiring the Enterprise

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

Early Adopters of ‘Unwired Enterprise’

n LogicaCMG has leveraged the Sybase

technology to create a flexible mobile employee system for Britannia Airwars’

cabin crew and pilots. The application provides more than 2,300 airline

employees with access to crew rosters, passenger information, air traffic

control notices, safety notices, updated destination details and duty free sales

information using a Wi-Fi network in the airport crew rooms prior to take-off.

Apparently, Britannia has saved some $750,000 (Rs 33 crore) per year by

automating just a 50 paper-based workflow processes.

n Lyondell-CITGO Refining is another

major user of Sybase, which uses a mobile workflow management application

developed for it by SAT Corporation. This company is a joint venture between

Lyondell Chemical and CITGO Petroleum is one of the largest refiners of heave

crude oil in the US. Using Sybase technology, SAT’s Intela Trac software

enables field operators using an RFID asset identification system integrated in

a handheld computer running a on a wireless LAN to improve key performance

indicators. Now, the company has reduced the cost of maintenance work orders by

30% and cut the time between equipment failures by over half in many process

units.

n BizRate.com is an ‘information

factory’ for more than 2,000 merchant customers, enabling them to offer data

in real time and allow merchants to query that data in any way they wanted.

Queries took up to three minutes in a standard relational database management

systems (RDBMS). These are now returned in one second and BizRate.com can

transform 15 million customer data sets into a dynamic and flexible data

warehouse capable of processing continuous, multiple ad hoc queries from

participating merchants.