This year Sybase SA celebrates its 15th year as the sole African representative of Sybase Inc., the world’s largest enterprise software company and has emerged as a formidable local IT solutions company, with an impressive 15-year profit history and portfolio of 300 customers across 3,000 sites. Sybase focuses on providing open, cross-platform data management solutions that securely deliver information anytime, anywhere, enabling customers to create an information edge.
Sybase Inc. has enjoyed 21 years as a global leader in data management, mobile, wireless and financial services solutions and in
2005 generated revenues of $900 million. The company has more than 40,000 enterprise customers worldwide, with 95 of the Fortune 100 companies running Sybase technology.
Sybase is dedicated to creating the ‘unwired enterprise’ for organisations by providing products and services that tie different information systems together and distribute that information to whoever, wherever and whenever they need it. Whether it’s for web-based development, operational systems, decision support or mobile applications, Sybase technology is helping companies get more out of their information and its success is demonstrated in its 73% market share of the mobile solutions market, with a major focus in government and the top global financial, insurance, healthcare and telecommunications companies.
“Today, companies are producing and demanding access to more data than ever before and an increasing number of organisations are recognising information as a strategic part of their business,” says Sybase CEO Alan Cowley. “As more organisations put the idea of ‘data as an asset’ into practice and recognise the strategic value of information, so too will companies move to ensure that information is consistently useful, relevant, and ready to deliver economic value.”
To this end, Sybase SA provides solutions that enable customers to securely access information and applications easily, from anywhere, integrate the flow of information, independent of source or destination and manage and extend the value of information, from databases to devices. “This approach benefits customers in creating an information edge over their competitors,” Cowley says. “With Sybase software solutions, customers can optimise and enhance the investments they already own, link together the valuable data resources already in place and extend the reach of business-critical information to users on the front lines – giving them financial agility and a productivity edge across all areas of their business.”
According to Cowley, customers choose Sybase because its solutions are based on open, cross-platform technologies to enable existing databases, applications, middleware and mobile device platforms to work together. “Regardless of whether the computing environment is centralised, distributed, mobile or a mix of all three, our innovative solutions enable organisations to control costs, ensure future scalability and make better use of all data across all locations and lines of business,” he adds. “Using our open, cross-platform approach, companies can overcome the wide disparity of technology standards, protocols and platforms that limit access to today’s mobile devices.”
He points out that users are empowered at the point of action and have vital information at their fingertips, increasing overall productivity and customer satisfaction. “Sybase helps companies to take its business closer to its customer, offer better service, reduce data capture effort, inaccuracies, increasing productivity.”
Cowley attributes Sybase’s local success, profitability track record and blue chip client base that includes Standard Bank, Investec, Pick ‘n Pay, First Rand Group, Nedcor and Telkom, to its holistic spectrum of complementary product offerings, which incorporate best-of-breed products. “Other major differentiators include our understanding and experience in all focus areas, access to global IP and best practices, reputation as a technology leader, as well as our team’s dynamic energy.”
After recent shareholder changes, Sybase SA is poised to fulfil its strategy to find the right black empowerment partner. “While a 5% stake of Sybase SA remains with Sybase Inc., it is our intention to tie up with an empowerment shareholder that is interested in an involved partnership,” explains Cowley. “A shared vision and chemistry as well as a significant financial investment to help achieve our ambitious growth plans is also a necessity.”
An Extended Offering
Today, Sybase SA’s product set offers an extended range of industry-leading infrastructure software, data management, development, and integration solutions that include complementary product offerings from other leading multi-national vendors. These products fall under the banners of solution-focused practice divisions, namely Sybase SA’s Data Management, BIPractice, iAnywhere and Sybase Education divisions. Data Management
The value proposition of Sybase today is to assist companies achieve the Intelligent Enterprise – a state where information is available at the point where it needs to be. With increased regulatory requirements, as well as day-to-day transactional and informational generation of data, data volumes in organisations are exploding exponentially. This data can be both structured and unstructured in nature. “Sybase assists companies with optimising their data assets to deliver better intelligence, decision making, trend and impact analysis to the business through strategic data management,” says Cowley.
Within Strategic Data Management Sybase identifies three themes, namely architecture, availability and security.
“Effective data architecture ensures that you have an optimal design of your database environment. Thereafter you need to create and deploy the database in as easy and efficient manner as possible and effectively manage it,” he explains.
From an availability point of view, optimising organisational data assets is essential. There is an ongoing requirement to get your systems to run better, faster. Often as data volumes grow, one sees degradation in performance of systems. One example is to take in-active portions of data off the system by deploying an archiving strategy. Proactive performance management and monitoring is key and by automating and optimising your environment, you can free up key resources to be available for more important tasks. With the growth of data volumes, optimising of data becomes a key issue and technologies like Sybase’s ASE 15 solution is designed to deal with the explosion of data.
Ensuring that your system is available involves proper disaster recovery, and/or redundancy. Cowley says a company should adopt a strategy for availability of strategic investment rather than expensive insurance, where a thought out redundancy plan can still serve a purpose even when you’re not experiencing disasters.
Security includes solutions like encryption in systems i.e. a database that is able to encode sensitive data and ensure the secure transmitting of data. Therefore it is important to have security methodologies that are consistent across multiple systems. Sybase’s database pioneered data encryption in its form without having any impact on the performance of the database.
To address these three data management areas, in addition to Sybase PowerDesigner and WorkSpace data management solutions, Sybase SA also carries the Embarcardero range of products, which offers data lifecycle management tools that enable organisations to efficiently and accurately architect, integrate, administer, manage and ensure critical enterprise applications and their underlying databases. They provide rapid development and optimal performance of applications that are critical to enterprises as they deploy and extend their information technology infrastructures.
This extended offering has also led to the formation of an extended services division that offers a range of expert skills covering business analysis, database design and administration, application design and development.
BIPractice
META Group predicts that the market for data quality software and services will grow 20% to 30% annually through 2007, supporting the observation that companies are committed to actually doing something about their data quality problems.
Sybase’s BIPractice division has nearly a decade of experience in deploying the world's most trusted business intelligence solutions to help organisations transform the quality and intelligence of their business information for optimum business performance, and represents numerous vendors including Sybase, Business Objects, Informatica and IBM Ascential.
Its impressive client portfolio includes FNB, Pick ‘n Pay, Sanlam, Netcare and Total. “We help our customers align performance management with critical business procedures, enabling better decision-making and real business insight every day,” says Estelle de Beer, general manager of Sybase SA’s BIPractice.
“In our role as consultative trusted BI advisor we consult with the customer to ensure the deployment of the best solutions for their individual requirements and where necessary, we can integrate and consolidate data from diverse and disparate sources,” says de Beer. “We then make recommendations and utilise best-of-breed products to provide a complete, end-to-end business intelligence solution that provides data quality, data warehousing, ETL, reporting and analytics ensuring a guaranteed return on investment.”
iAnywhere
Sybase SA also represents iAnywhere, a Sybase company and the world leader in the provision of mobile software solutions, to support increasing demand for solutions that mobilise workforces to achieve improved worker productivity, streamlined operations and reduced costs.
“iAnywhere plays an important role in Sybase’s global unwired enterprise strategy, which focuses on managing and mobilising information from the data centre to the point of action,” says Cowley. “Sybase’s vision of the Unwired Enterprise leverages iAnywhere’s leadership in mobile computing and is complemented by Sybase’s strengths in information management and development and integration software.” The company’s software has received top honors and accolades from industry magazines and analysts. More than 15,000 customers and 1,000 partners in 50 countries, including 81 of the Fortune 100 leverage iAnywhere software. In addition, the company holds the market position as number one in the mobile database market, mobile middleware and mobile management.
iAnywhere provides software and services that enable the delivery of enterprise information anywhere, anytime and provides solutions that enable applications used on the front lines of business to be just as reliable and secure and available as those at head office under the banners of mobile enterprise, management, security and database solutions.
Cowley says that iAnywhere mobility products deliver context, email and other services to mobile PDAs and devices ensuring information is always available across millions of mobile devices globally. “Over 15 million subscribers, 20,000 customers and partners rely on the company’s “Always Available” award winning technologies and products that include SQL Anywhere, Afaria, OneBridge, and the AvantGo mobile Internet service.”
Venture Development Corporation estimates the global market for commercial mobile software, which includes operating systems application frameworks, java service and provisioning solutions, which exceeded $560 million in 2004 to reach $1.6 billion by 2008.
“We believe this expected growth combined with the rapid advances in mobile devices will result in substantial opportunities lying ahead for our iAnywhere solution offering,” says Gerard Sofianos, GM at Sybase SA’s iAnywhere division. “Moreover, as enterprises continue to grow their frontline deployments, mobile management and security solutions are key requirements for ensuring the success of these applications.
Our strategic vision is to deliver a comprehensive single vendor platform that encompasses all enterprise business mobile needs such as PIM (personal information management), application enablement, device management and security.”
iAnywhere’s “always available” mobile technology, provides an easy and effective solution for distributing, installing and managing software, data and files on remote systems from one central point, while driving ROI (Return On Investment) results, through measurable gains in efficiency and productivity.
Sybase Education
Sybase’s training division provides courses for its clients and strategic partners on all of Sybase SA’s products. In addition, a certification centre for Datastage and Gartner’s Project Management Course are also offered. Sybase SA is also a Certified Redhat Linux training partner, a Certified Datastage training Partner and a Certified BusinessObjects training partner. The division also offers independent business related courses including DW methodology, Rapid track – business analysis and project management training.
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About Sybase 
