Sybase rides growing database business into mobility innovation, says Chen at user conference

Sybase Chairman, CEO and President John Chen opened the TechWave Sybase user conference today with a slew of product announcements and a proud pointer to a growing database market -- growing at double-digit revenue growth (even if you're not IBM, Microsoft and Oracle).

Chen boasted 38 percent database revenue growth in Sybase's latest quarter, outstripping his formidable competitors. He told the crowd of IT users gathered in Las Vegas that the underlying database business is strong.

Sybase at the 10th annual event has announced tools, analytics and mobile products that target Sybase's global customer base of developers, database administrators, operators as well as its burgeoning enterprise mobility infrastructure solutions providers.

"We're making a run at the major data warehouse providers ... and we think we can compete very well," said Chen. "Things are working very well for the company."

For mobility, in a year where the Apple iPhone gained the lion's share of attention (despite Symbian's dominance), Sybase is driving toward the "unwired enterprise" to bring the analytics world together with the mobile tier and handheld delivery world. "The more devices and the more operating systems ... the better Sybase will be," said Chen.

Based on any metric data continues to explode across the IT landscape, said Chen. And the emphasis on real time and deep and wide analytics is only accelerating. Chen calls it "decision ready information."

Chen asked -- practically implored -- the users to get more into their mobility strategy, to unwire their enterprises.

Sybase Senior Vice President Raj Nathan said that mobile computing is overtaking older forms of communications and computing, as a theme for his portion of today's keynote presentation. But the current IT infrastructure can not well support this trend to mobility and information delivery out to the mobile edge.

"If you look at who is accessing the data, it's no longer just the employees ... and the demands of the non-employee for accessing from outside the firewall ... is much different. Today's architectures will not meet this demand," said Nathan.

Applications also need to be designed to be transaction-centric, said Nathan. What developers have to deal with has changed. "It's not just transactional applications, it's analytics, mobile, and messaging applications," he said. "These applications come from outside the firewall and through a mobile device in a unstructured, ad hoc form."

This all requires a shift in IT architectures, said Nathan. We need message-oriented interfaces. Data, applications, and tools -- all need to adjust. You need to handle complex analytics as a part of the process, not an after-thought, he said.

"The demands of information are changing, and you need a different set of architecture paradigms to make this happen," said Nathan. "Information delivery is even more important. It's time to evolve this and not go through a full set of replacements."