Sybase demos swift use of iPhone as mobile client to corporate email, calendar, PIM

For those who think the Apple iPhone will not be a corporate mobile client any time soon, think again.

Sybase demonstrated today a straightforward way to use an Apple iPhone to access such enterprise email stalwarts as Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino servers. Not only was the email and associated attachments available via the iPhone's native client email software, but real-time access to the business user's corporate calendar and address book were there too.

Today's demonstration, before a group of industry and financial analysts at an annual Sybase user conference in Las Vegas, also showed unified communications functions, including click-to-call on the iPhone from the online corporate directory. Sybase says its capability to provide such integration is unique among mobile infrastructure vendors.

For the demo, Sybase used its Information Anywhere Suite infrastructure from its iAnywhere product line to deliver the corporate messaging goods to the iPhone client. The messaging integration via Information Anywhere is secure by using SSL, does not require IMAP, and connects through existing ports.

That means that corporate IT personnel can accommodate business users who want to use iPhones to access their core corporate communications without a lot of IT overhead. It takes five minutes to set up a user, following the same basic steps as setting up a Windows Mobile connection, said Sybase.

The enterprise email-to-iPhone support service is not yet publicly available, but it soon could be. Already many enterprises in the U.S. are asking Sybase and its partners for ways to use the iPhone for corporate messaging. Such inquiries are also coming from Europe, where the iPhone is not even yet available.

No details were forthcoming on availability of the iPhone connectivity services, thought Sybase certainly seems to like the idea of working closely with Apple to make the capability a commercial reality.

"We will do some work with Apple to make this a very powerful experience," said Terry Stepien, president of Sybase's iAnywhere division.

While many observers have pegged the iPhone as a consumer device, Sybase, in Dublin, CA, examined the device and found that the existing Apple OS X-based APIs are strong enough for enterprise messaging use. Recognizing that IT messaging administrators resist IMAP standards due to security concerns, Sybase made the iPhone a corporate client without using IMAP.

Quite a bit more could be done, however. Stepien said that the native calendar client on iPhone could be exploited if APIs for that were available.

From where I sat watching the demo, an Apple-Sybase solution to satisfy those who want to add the iPhone to other sanctioned corporate mobile clients is a no-brainer. This is a development to keep an eye on, and may bring iPhone to an influential class of business user sooner than most thought possible.

Look for more Linux-based mobile devices in a Palm near you

Linux on mobile devices got a boost this week with a slew of announcements out of LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

One telling announcement came with Palm's decision to go with Wind River Systems' Linux as the platform for the upcoming Palm Foleo, the sub-compact companion for smartphones. While the Foleo was designed to be Linux-based from the get-go, the decision went to go with Wind River's device-optimized version of Linux.

Wind River will also provide its development suite, professional services, and customer support in bringing the Foleo to market. The Foleo is billed as a smart-phone adjunct that allows users to view and work on phone-based email with a larger screen and full-size keyboard. It also allows Web surfing, editing, and Power Point presentations.

Without having made a formal debut, the Foleo is receiving mixed notices from the reviewer community. ZDNet's George Ou, thinks that, while it needs some tweaking, it poses a threat to the laptop. On the other side of that fence, Alice Hill from Real Tech News thinks it's going to bomb, and gives five reasons why it will fail.

As with most new devices, only time will tell. A key to success will be bulk purchases by enterprises for their edge and remote workers. Not sure the pricey iPhone makes sense there (yet).

Meanwhile, the LiMo Foundation, which is dedicated to the adoption of Linux in the mobile device community, announced what it called "a significant membership surge," with the addition of five new core members and eight associate members.

The core members, who will participate on the board, include Aplix, Celunite, LG Electronics, McAfee, and Wind River. Associate members include ARM, Broadcom, Ericsson, Innopath, KTF, MontaVista Software, and NXP B.V.

LiMo's goal is to create the world's first globally competitive, Linux-based software platform for mobile devices, and organizers expect to see the first handsets supporting the LiMo platform on the market in the first half of 2008.

In other Linux-mobile news, Motorola and Wind River has formed a strategic alliance designed to provide integrated Advanced TCA(R) and Micro TCATM communication platforms with Carrier Grade Linux and VxWorks runtimes. This is aimed at providing bundled hardware and software solutions for telecom, military, aerospace, medical, and industrial automation.

Disclosure: Wind River has been a sponsor of BriefngsDirect podcasts, which I produce and moderate.

IBM adds to 'information on demand' drive with Princeton Softech acquisition

IBM is beefing up its "information on demand" initiative with the announcement today of its intention to acquire Princeton Softech, Inc.

Princeton's Optim cross-platform data management software will provide a big boost in meeting the needs of data governance, as well as controlling costs from an increase in data volumes. This becomes a primary corporate concern in light of estimates that storage management may soon represent nearly 50 percent of an annual IT budget.

As organizations are required to retain data longer for auditing, cost becomes an issue if archival data remains on operational systems, eating up storage capacity and degrading performance. Princeton's archiving offerings helps remove the data from those systems, while allowing it to still be accessible and usable.

The other prong of regulatory requirements comes with security of data, especially customer information that is deemed private. In addition to the costs of maintaining huge amount of historical data on operational systems, the potential penalties from exposing private customer data can be daunting. Princeton's data-masking capability is designed to preserve data integrity and efficient archiving.

Princeton also provides test data management software that creates test databases, in which sensitive customer data can be masked and the underlying data protected from corruption during the tests.

The acquisition is one of a long string of smaller, often private companies that IBM has been buying to fill out its data lifecycle offerings. As we've said before, getting your data act together is an essential aspect of being able to move to SOA. This purchase seems to buttress that approach.

Princeton Softech, with 240 employees, is privately held, and has been in operation since 1989. No financial details were disclosed for the deal, which needs regulatory approval. Both companies hope the acquisition will be complete within the next two months.

OpenSpan report card: Plays well with others

Quick question: What is the most-used technology for integrating apps on the desktop? If you said "copy-and-paste," then you'd be right, and it probably means you've been listening to Francis Carden, CEO of OpenSpan Inc.

Carden uses the copy-and-paste statistic to emphasize how little integration has advanced in the industry, despite all the effort of the last two decades.

OpenSpan of Alpharetta, Ga., offers what it claims is a new and unique way to integrate the multitude of currently siloed apps on which many operations rely today. How OpenSpan works is that it identifies the objects that interact with the operating system in any program -- whether a Windows app, a Web page, a Java application, or a legacy green screen program -- exposes those objects and normalizes them, effectively breaking down the walls between applications.

The OpenSpan Studio provides a graphical interface in which users can view programs, interrogate applications and expose the underlying objects. Once the objects are exposed, users can build automations between and among the various programs and apply logic to control the results.

For example, the integration can be designed to take information from legacy applications, pass it to an Internet search engine, perform the search, and pass the result on to a third application. All this can be done transparently to the end user with a single mouse click. The operation can run with the applications involved open on the desktop, or they can run in the background while the integration runs in a dashboard.

Setting up such an integration in OpenSpan can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, depending on the complexity of the operation and the number of programs involved.

What happens if the objects in one of the source programs changes, something that could happen frequently if third-party Web pages are involved? According to Carden, it's a simple matter of re-interrogating the affected objects on the revised page and replacing them in original workflow, using the OpenSpan studio.

While others are trying to do what OpenSpan does, Carden says that the others do it in different ways and that his company's approach is unique. It does not require specific programming knowledge, nor does it require access to the source code of the underlying programs or recompiling those codes.

"I like to say were the 'last mile to SOA,'" Carden said. "We can take a 25-year-old application and make it consume a Web service."

According to Carden, the idea of digging into applications and objects at the operating system level was something that was always able to be done by what he calls "rocket scientists." The only problem, he says, is that it was a time-consuming process and was basically a one-off effort. OpenSpan is a way to productize the process and make it available to non-rocket scientists.

For some companies, integrating applications is critical to performance and agility. Carden tells of one client, a large bank, where workers had to deal with 1,600 applications -- although that's a little extreme. The average is about eight.

OpenSpan is currently riding high with an infusion of venture capital from Sigma Partners and Matrix Partners and an infusion of talent with the addition of four key players who were formerly executives with JBoss.

Microsoft's 'service-enabled' approach is really only sorta-SOA

A new article on Redmondmag.com examines the fascinating topic of Microsoft and SOA. Microsoft's strategy -- pivoting on the strengths of Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) as well as (huh?) applications virtualization -- is different from earlier "embrace and extend" market assault campaigns.

Microsoft's SOA strategy amounts to embrace and contract. They want to allow services-enablement using the newest (read: massive upgrades) Microsoft infrastructure to offer a modest embrace of heterogeneity. However, the high-level rationale for SOA is to make heterogeneity a long-term asset, rather than a liability. You should not have to massively upgrade to .NET Framework 3.0 (and tools, and server platforms, and runtimes) to leverage SOA. As we know, SOA is a style and conceptual computing framework, not a reason to upgrade.

I'm liberally quoted in this article, so you can gather the gist of my observations in it. What is curious is the response Microsoft proffers to any suggestion that Windows Everywhere is not somehow synonymous with SOA.

I'm especially betwixt by the assertion that virtualizing a monolithic Windows application, so that it can be hosted (on Windows servers) and accessed via a browser as a service, allows it to "... be part of an SOA-like strategy."

Sorry, dudes, that doesn't even come close to a SOA-enablement of that application. Now, being able to deconstruct said application into a bevy of independent services that can be easily mixed and matched with others (regardless of origin, runtime, framework or operational standards) gets a wee bit closer to the notion.

How about delivering those legacy Windows monolithic server stack applications as deconstructed loosely coupled services on virtualized Windows runtime instances on a hot-swappable Linux on multicore x86 blade farms? Yeee-ha!

It's also curious to see the rationale for Microsoft's sorta-SOA through the lens of needing to gain "... the ability to rapidly evolve an application because you need to change things in near-real time," said Steve Martin, director of product management for Microsoft's Connected Systems Division, as quoted in the article.

This may be RAD or Agile or even Lean -- but it really isn't quite SOA. What we're thinking on the SOA business value plane is the ability to "rapidly evolve" business processes, to actually not have to muck around with the underlying applications and data (nor necessarily upgrade their environments) but instead extract and extend their value into a higher abstraction where transactions, services, data, metadata, and logic can be agilely related and universally governed.

Not sure if BizTalk Server has gained that feature set yet. Visio? Well, obviously you have not yet upgraded sufficiently, dear reader.

It's plain from the article that Microsoft will define SOA to suit its strengths and sidestep it's weaknesses. At least on that count Microsoft is adhering to the standard industry approach. But the risks for Microsoft as it seeks a higher profile in the core datacenters of the global 2000 of not applying SOA at its higher business value is significant. Better stated, they may win some battles but lose the war.

Already, competitors such as IBM, Oracle and BEA are moving toward offerings that reduce the emphasis on applications (virtualized or not) and instead places the emphasis on business processes maneuverability. And just like with SaaS, it's not about the technology -- but is everything about the business paybacks (top-line and bottom-line) and overall IT risk reduction. The business model of both the vendor and the customer need to match up.

IBM's strategies around reuse and its focus on creating pools of services that can be applied not generally to IT but specifically to business verticals, industries, and even individual enterprises (think of its as the long tail wags SOA), is ultimately an aligning influence between IBM and its partners and customers. What runs IT beneath is more optional, so you might as well seek the best cost-benefits approach, which will include open source infrastructure, SaaS, and all the other options in the market.

If you save big on business agility, the cost differences of the underlying infrastructure (say between IBM or BEA or Microsoft) is a rounding error -- but you have to deliver business agility.

IT needs to move holistically at the speed of businesses. Microsoft seems to be saying with sorta-SOA that, "Hey, it will cost you less to virtualize your Windows applications so use us, even though you gain less total agility." Does not compute, Will Robinson.

Microsoft's sorta-SOA approach may have short-term benefits for Redmond, but medium- to long-term it divides Microsoft from its customers and prospects and their needed goals for IT. I've said it before, what's good for Microsoft is not necessarily good for its customers, their balance sheets, or their business agility. And only Microsoft can change that.

An enterprise that embraces sorta-SOA from Microsoft only will compete with an enterprise that embraces and extends SOA liberally, openly, leveraging all the options in the global market of labor, information, infrastructure, services, and both business and hosting models flexibility. As inclusive IT agility becomes the primary business enabler globally and specifically, the choices will be fairly stark fairly quickly. The choices will be more stark and more quickly for ISVs, service providers, and telcos.

At some point the savvy IT leaders may ask if dragging Windows Everywhere along for the ride makes sense. Why not just use sorta-SOA to expose all the existing Microsoft stuff, cut bait and move on for the real differentiating IT functionality and productivity?

Will Microsoft's vision of Windows Everywhere "plus services" do better for their clients than enterprises that just move to services everywhere? This is the ultimate question.

What's most likely about Microsoft's current SOA strategy is that it keeps them on the nuts and bolts level of good tools to make good applications and good services -- but at a price. Nowadays, making the services themselves, however, does not hijack the decisions on infrastructure, as it did in the past.

In a loosely coupled, virtualized world -- where hosting and deployment options abound -- there is nothing that locks in the applications as services to any platform. This is true on both the client and server, and more true at the higher abstractions of metadata and business processes.

And, sure, there will be new choke points, such as governance, policy, semantical symmetry -- but none of them for SOAs seem to carry the added tax of necessary, routine, massive upgrades of specific essential components up and down a pre-configured stack to work. Sorta.

The playing field is a bit more level. May the best IT approaches to total business agility win.

Disclosure: I am a paid columnist for Redmond Developer News, a sister publication to Redmond Magazine.