Sybase today unveiled Sybase Mobility Platform, which extends enterprise systems to employees and customers who are using smartphones.
Sybase Mobility Platform will help enterprises to bridge the divide between consumer and enterprise mobility, said Marty Beard, president of Sybase 365, the company’s mobile services business unit. Customers expect mobile services, because they are already using them for paying bills and checking account balances. However, enterprises struggle to provide them, he explained.
“Despite significant developments in mobile device functionality and performance and the widespread usage by consumers, enterprise mobility is still very complex and costly as a result of siloed systems and device interoperability,” said Stephen Drake, program vice president, IDC.
Sybase is attempting to relieve the complexity of developing mobile services by offering an integrated platform, Beard said. The Sybase Mobility Platform is designed to allow developers to take an iterative approach to building mobile services, added Terry Stepien, president of Sybase iAnywhere.
The platform is made up of three pillars: servers, applications and mobile services. Each component will be available as a cloud service hosted by Sybase, but customers may also run some or all of the software on premises, said Stepien.
The servers include Sybase Unwired Platform, a 4GL solution for building mobile applications that connect with back-end data, as well as Sybase’s SQL Anywhere database.
Other servers handle device management and Sybase’s iAnywhere Mobile Office middleware for extending business processes and e-mail services to devices.
The applications tier is comprised of solutions from Sybase and its partners. Initial offerings are Sybase’s Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite, Sybase Mobile Sales for SAP CRM, and a mobile banking offering called mBanking 365.The SAP-targeted applications run natively on each supported smartphone platform.
Earlier this month, SAP announced that it is acquiring Sybase in a US$5.8 billion cash deal. The transaction will close in the third quarter. SAP’s in-memory database technology will be used to add analytics and complex event processing to Sybase’s mobile solutions, Stepien said.
Sybase will provide back-end infrastructure for e-commerce services, enterprise CRM, and marketing applications and services, as well as operator services. Location services and Near Field Communication capabilities will be added over time, Stepien said.
Near Field Communication is a wireless communications technology that enables smartphones to exchange data with devices that are in close proximity, such as vending machines.
Pricing for the Sybase Mobility Platform in the cloud will be on a per-transaction basis. On-premises licensing varies based on how many hubs are installed, Stepien said.
