Sybase Uncorks Unwired Enterprise

The Dublin, Calif.-based company is offering Unwired Accelerator and Unwired Orchestrator, which enable developers to bring business applications to mobile devices, said Neil McGovern, director of strategy for the Sybase Information Technology and Solutions Group.

The industry for several years has touted making existing business applications mobile as a growth opportunity for solution providers. But that hype has only recently become reality because carrier networks and new devices are now sophisticated enough to support such applications, said Jeff Reed, CTO of reseller and solution provider Logicalis, Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

"This proliferation [of wireless technology] is giving enterprises a reason to actually take some of the enterprise data and software processes they have and get them out to the field, to the mobile worker," Reed said.

Unwired Accelerator is a rapid mobilization tool that takes business processes and other components from back-end applications and refashions them into applications with an appropriate GUI for a variety of wireless devices, including PDAs, smartphones and tablet PCs.

Unwired Orchestrator allows solution providers to tap into back-end systems and turn data and functionality into services that can be combined into more complex business processes. Developers can then expose these processes to mobile applications so they can run on a host of wireless devices, McGovern said.

Pricing for Accelerator starts at $8,700 per CPU, and pricing for Orchestrator starts at $13,500 per CPU. Sybase has the lion's share of the mobile database market through the success of its iAnywhere subsidiary. But the vendor was late to market in the enterprise middleware space and now other vendors are catching up, Reed said.

With its Unwired Enterprise initiative, Sybase hopes to differentiate itself and maintain its strength in the mobile application infrastructure space, he said. "Sybase has to do a good job emphasizing that they've been doing this forever," Reed said. "This product line is the two-punch sort of toolset for the enterprise."