Develop, Deploy and Manage Mobile Applications with Sybase

fact sheet Vendor: Sybase, Inc. (www.sybase.com) Vendor's Information: About Sybase Unwired Platform About Sybase, Inc.

The mobile device market is fractured, to say the least. Thanks to ubiquitous marketing by the consumer side of the major wireless providers, your family might have a family plan that puts everyone on the same network. You might even have the same phone, or at least phones from the same manufacturer. The same is rarely true of the enterprise.

At this moment your enterprise has dozens, if not hundreds, of types of mobile devices. These devices run on a variety of operating systems, they access networks from various providers, and they have different capabilities concerning voice, data, and Web access.

As long as all of your mobile enterprise users are content using their devices as basic phones or personal organizers, this doesn't present too much of a problem. But the day is coming, and likely already passed, when your enterprise mobile users will want to use their disparate devices and networks to access the same corporate data through their mobile device that they access when sitting at their desk.

For IT departments this scenario presents challenges on several fronts. They need to develop applications for the various mobile devices, they need to manage the devices, and they need to secure the devices and the data.

Despite these challenges, IT organizations need to recognize that strategic mobile deployments have several benefits and that discouraging their use can lead to unofficial, siloed, or departmental mobile applications that create further headaches. According to a whitepaper by IDC, mobile applications improve organizational efficiency, allow managers to approve and delegate faster, and increase the speed of processing documents like proposals and contracts.

IDC recommends that enterprises deal with the complexity and heterogeneity of the mobile landscape by adopting a mobile enterprise platform that delivers the key tools to build and deploy new mobile applications.

Such a platform should include data services that can access data from a variety of sources, whether that data is structured, unstructured, or on a pre-packaged application. Mobile middleware services are needed to bridge the gap between enterprise data and mobile devices. Support for messaging services that allow mobile users to receive alerts is a must-have.

Device services are needed to manage application development across a range of mobile hardware platforms. The platform should also have development tools that integrate into existing development tools, making for quick and easy mobile application development without the need to learn new development tools.

Finally, your mobile enterprise platform should have an administrative console that allows the IT department to easily manage, secure, and deploy mobile applications and devices.

Sybase Unwired Platform
Sybase Unwired Platform is a next-generation architecture for mobile enterprise application development. Its comprehensive services allow customers to mobilize appropriate data and business processes for enterprises using virtually any mobile device. Sybase Unwired Platform significantly reduces a company's total cost of ownership (TCO) by enabling strategic mobile deployments instead of tactical or siloed mobile application approaches.

Sybase has worked with thousands of customers over the past 20 years delivering mobility and integrating with back-end applications like SAP, Remedy, and other applications that use databases or service-oriented architectures. The platform leverages Sybase’s experience with development tools called PowerBuilder and PowerDesigner, to now deliver 4GL RAD tools that enable developers to easily build mobile applications.

Sybase Unwired Platform includes a tooling environment that greatly simplifies mobile application development by integrating with the Visual Studio and Eclipse development environments, enabling developers to leverage their existing tools and expertise. Developers can use the platform to design once and easily deploy to a range of mobile device types, classes, and operating systems, including Windows Mobile, Windows 32 (laptops/tablets), and RIM BlackBerry.

When Delta Airlines wanted its 220 field engineers to have access to critical back-end systems and e-mail anytime, anywhere, its Delta Technology subsidiary developed a Field Engineer Mobility Solution using Sybase’s mobile platform.

The mobile solution allows Delta's field engineers to identify and resolve problems, often before frontline employees or customers knew they existed. By building it on Sybase’s mobile platform, Delta can manage and support any mobile device on a wired or wireless connection in either synchronous or asynchronous mode and integrate it with back-end applications and databases. The platform also allows Delta Technology to develop and deploy future mobile applications without starting from scratch each time.

Sybase Unwired Platform is fully integrated with Afaria, Sybase's industry-leading device management and security solution, which provides a single administrative console to centrally manage, secure, and deploy mobile data, applications, and devices.

Afaria gives IT the level of control and visibility required to proactively manage and secure multiple device types, applications, data, and communications critical to frontline success, regardless of the bandwidth available. This frees frontline workers from the burden of management tasks, which increases user adoption and productivity.

The Afaria solution includes an antivirus and firewall manager; backup manager; configuration manager; document manager; inventory manager; license manager; Afaria OneTouch, which simplifies the process of connecting to a network, logging in, and completing critical application-related tasks like security checks, synchronizations and backup; patch manager; Afaria Remote Control, which gives administrators takeover capabilities to diagnose and repair problems; session manager; security manager; and a software manager.