Web services on the move

ALTHOUGH WEB SERVICES have yet to come into vogue in mobile computing environments, vendors in this space are beginning to ponder their implications. Sybase, for example, plans to add support for Web services to its iAnywhere database for mobile computing. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard and Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, Brian Vink, vice president of marketing for Sybase’s iAnywhere Solutions subsidiary, talks about how in the near future mobile devices will be able to make themselves available to Web services.

InfoWorld: The whole database aspect of mobile computing is pretty transparent to users. So why should IT group care about this category?

InfoWorld: Where are these licenses deployed?

Vink: We’ve been successful in two main categories. One is corporate applications, where people have gone and developed their systems to either automate or enable their mobile workforce. The other component of our business, which is probably the larger one, is our embedded partner business. We have over 600 partners that embed our technology. Our biggest partners are very large names in the industry such as Siebel, Veritas, and Cisco.

InfoWorld: What role will Web services play in mobile computing?

Vink: As part of Sybase, we have strong component to our story surrounding Web services. If you look at Web services as being potential ways for multiple companies to integrate with a variety of enterprise information sources, our strategy around those Web services is to enable them for mobile and wireless environments. We think it’s very compelling for mobile and wireless environments because you often want to extend enterprise information to the places where business transactions need to occur. Most of the ways that that occurs is by companies exposing that enterprise information via a Web service and then using our platform. Then you can access and integrate with that information right from that mobile device.

InfoWorld: Where do you take that concept next?

Vink: What we are expecting to come out with over the next couple of months is allowing our own platform to be exposed as a Web service. In other words, we have some messaging capabilities so that you can send messages back and forth. The whole strength of our technology in terms of our synchronization capabilities is the ability to resolve those kinds of unique circumstances in a mobile environment where you’ve got peers and you have a business problem. You can resolve conflicts according to your business rules, and our synchronization capabilities let you do that. On a peer level, what we do is we do provide the ability to go from one device to another device. We can also enable that communication to occur from the device via the server to the other device. It depends on how you want to architect your application.

InfoWorld: How important is Java in these mobile environments?

Vink: We’re getting a lot of interest in Java from developers embracing Java as a potential way of targeting mobile and wireless systems. We’re working with partners like Sony Ericsson and Sharp to deliver those kinds of solutions on those devices. I’d say that most of our deployed solutions that are out there aren’t necessarily on Java, but I think that the numbers that we’re seeing in terms of people [who] are downloading our Java products are increasingly [on Java]. Interestingly enough, the corporate IT community is one of the areas where we see a lot of that interest.

InfoWorld: So, in closing, can you give us an example of something innovative that your customers are doing with your technology?

Vink: We’ve been working with Sony Ericsson around some corporate applications. One of the things that we worked on was with a bank in Sweden that wanted to provide a unique banking experience to their customers. The typical banking experience that people have with mobile phones is that you had to always be connected to the bank and then you had to do your transactions. But if the transaction were to fail at any point, then you had to kind of start over. What we provided was an always-available banking model where; in essence, we created an application that ran on the device itself. In this case it was the Sony Ericsson device. What it did was it provided the bank with a rich application that they could provide to their top-tier customers [so] that they could then go and have a richer banking experience. They could present this as a loyalty program to those customers, and those customers found value in that as an alternate way of accessing their banking information.