While its mobile business still represents only around 18% of the Dublin, California-based company’s $800m annual revenue, Sybase claims leadership in small-footprint, mobile databases with a 73% market share, according to Marty Beard, its senior VP of corporate development and marketing.
To the mobile database per se, Sybase has been adding middle components over the last year or so, starting with the December 2002 acquisition of mobile content aggregation developer AvantGo. Then last year it spent another $95m for Xcellenet for its Afaria mobile device management product and Dejima for plain language interpretation, a product that became Answers Anywhere. Also in its portfolio is the SQL Anywhere Studio product for synchronization, developed by its subsidiary iAnywhere. The latter also last week launched an RFID middleware product enabling data from tags and readers to be fed to back-office systems for sectors such as retail and healthcare.
Beard said the company now plans an entry into mobile applications from an M&A standpoint, albeit only in specific niches. Concerned to allay fears Sybase is jumping in to compete head on with companies that use its databases and middleware, he was at pains to explain that the move is a more targeted one. We’ll be offering mobile applications in specific verticals, such as cable delivery people, shop floor guys and field force-oriented kinds of things, he said.
Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at UK analyst firm Quocirca, sees the move into what he referred to as blue collar mobile apps as a sensible one for Sybase as a sensible one, and the strategy of going very niche a good one, given that it’s a sector with greater growth potential than either ‘black’ collar early adopters in the media or white collar executives, but its very fragmented, so you need to concentrate on one particular subsector then use it as an example for others. It’s similar to their strategy in the middleware market, where they would do specific projects, then use them as a reference for a broader deployment.
