ITWire

"The first wave was the Blackberry mobile email. And the next wave will be mobilising applications like CRM and field sales. The third wave is taking those mobile applications and exposing them to business processes. And over 70 percent of those business processes are on legacy systems. If you get a mobile application to access those that will be fantastic, but you must first have both the [mobile device] management and security boxes ticked."

Thain said that Sybase had a number of initiatives underway for organisations looking to extend applications to mobile devices. "We have signed a co-innovation deal with SAP and we are building an SAP CRM on iPhone and Windows Mobile...

"We are developing platforms to support multiple devices. Our goal is for developers to be able to produce applications for multiple devices very easily. We will do that by abstracting a lot of the access so they can concentrate on the native platform they are deploying on."

He added: "Sybase are looking quite heavily into supporting the iPhone because people are increasingly taking it into companies"

Thain said that providing mobile device management services to large corporates represented a good opportunity for telcos. However, local players seem to have been slow to take up this opportunity.

In Australia Sybase offers its services and products direct and through a number of business partners. Dereck Daymond, managing director of Sybase for Australia and New Zealand, told iTWire that as a result of the SAP agreement the company had been able to generate some interest from the major telcos.

"For SAP we will start by mobilising their CRM application which is part of their eBusiness suite. Once we have done that we can go every SAP customer in the country and say 'If you want to access your back end systems through mobile devices, we have the ability to do that upfront.' As a result of that, we have had some interest from the big telcos, including Telstra."

He added that the Verizon Business announcement should increase this interest. "Verizon Business is the first cab off the rank but we will follow this up with some of the other telcos."

Daymond said: "We will be touching base with Verizon Business locally to see how they want to go to market here, but they will be doing the selling as part of their suite of managed services... We will be supplying the software and whatever professional services they require."

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