By William Fellows

Is Sybase viable? That’s the question CEO John Chen says he rarely has to answer these days, although a year ago when he stepped up to chief executive role it was usually one of the first on customers’ lips. Having ‘divisionalized’ the company to stimulate growth – and with five consecutive profitable quarters behind him – Chen’s next challenge is to deliver Sybase’s web/internet database strategy and to make up ground on IBM, Oracle and Informix which have already delivered their internet plays.

Sybase’s Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 12.0 database will be out by year-end supporting Java, Java/SQL and XML. Chen is touting ASE as the basis for enterprise portals and flags its support for Tibco’s publish and subscribe and IBM’s MQSeries messaging. Speaking at this week’s Sybase user conference Chen was particularly upbeat about Sybase’s progress in the financial services market, because of its transactional focus, traditionally the company’s strongest area. Chen said Sybase is used in 68% of securities industry association member firm’s client/server systems, up from 62% in 1997. We wonder how much of that is down to Sybase refugees making procurement recommendations at their Wall Street employers.

Sybase is offering a new piece of middleware called enterprise event broker aimed at integrating database applications which is claimed to automate the capture, transformation and delivery of business events across database applications. It combines Tibco and MQSeries and is aimed at integrating enterprise portals.

Sybase is also offering new versions of its pre-defined data templates, or Industry Studio Warehouses for capital markets, credit cards and life insurance industries. Each come with five customer relationship management applications; campaign analysis, customer profile analysis, sales analysis, loyalty analysis and customer care analysis. They’re available September 1. It is also talking up other tools, design methodologies and consulting packages aimed at helping customers create businesses create e- business web sites. รก