Sybase spreads service far and wide

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 11 August 2009 13:49

IT Industry - Deals

Western Australia’s Water Corporation, which services customers over a 2.5 million square kilometre area of the state, has selected Sybase to provide management of mobile devices deployed to its field force.

The WA company said today it had selected Sybase’s Afaria enterprise-grade, highly scalable mobile device management and security solution, to be deployed with field service crews equipped with hand-held computing devices and laptops.

The Water Corporation’s sourcing manager information services, Harry Thompson, said the company was looking for a robust solution to protect the data on its field service crew’s mobile devices, and following a comprehensive review of the device management solutions available in the market, it selected Afaria due to its “comprehensive feature set, and competitive pricing.”

“Afaria was not only the best solution in terms of functionality but we’re also expecting it to ease the administrative burden of managing the fleet once it is deployed.”

Sybase managing director Australia and New Zealand, Dereck Daymond, said Afaria would enable Water Corporation’s IT department to centrally manage its field crew’s mobile devices in the most effective way possible. 

“Field staff use their devices to update Water Corporation’s systems with job status, work and event details as well as information about crew labour allocation.  Work crews can also be located in near real-time when the PDA is communicating to Water Corporation’s enterprise IT systems.”

According to Daymond, more confidential information is being stored on mobile devices, and organisations are looking for proven and tested solutions to secure and manage their digital assets in a wireless environment.

“Sybase’s deep expertise and longstanding commitment toward unwiring the enterprise has enabled us to offer customers the most mature, open and comprehensive mobile middleware platform available in the market today.”