While the potboiler of the Oracle-solicits-BEA story simmers on the front burner, there could be another option for BEA's board. Rather than BEA -- which states it will be happily acquired for $21 per share -- awaiting another software vendor to rescue it from the flinty grips of Oracle, why not seek out an entirely different sort of buyer?
A handful of the world's largest telecommunications carriers, I should think, ought to give serious consideration to BEA's plight. BEA would would do well to become the R&D arm, underlying infrastructure differentiator, integration hub, and sales/marketing channel lead into leading enterprise accounts for any carrier that needs to jump-start its business services offerings.
Now, I have suggested Microsoft might broaden its appeal to datacenter architects the world over by buying BEA, but Microsoft remains drunk on its growth potential as a Windows Everywhere vendor. And Microsoft would, seemingly, rather be late to the Web 2.0 bubble with a Facebook stake than late to the heterogeneous enterprise IT environment with a BEA-enabled segue to full IT and SOA solutions offerings.
Be that as it may, consider how a BEA would fit into a full-service telecommunications carrier's dominion in this pending new world of services, SaaS, subscriptions and the need for technology differentiation as carriers increasingly find themselves competing against Google, Apple, Microsoft, Salesforce.com.Yahoo!, Amazon and eBay.
Right. So if a Verizon, at&t, Sprint, Deutsche Telekom, Orange (France Telecom), or other large carriers were to consider having BEA as part of their organization, what would they get? First, consider that carriers were behind a lot of purely technical advances in computing, with Unix, networks, patents, and R&D emanating from such places as older AT&T, Bell Labs, Westinghouse, and even General Electric. So the precedent of carrier conglomerates being in the IT supplier and R&D business is fairly well established, and the recent history of these global giants outsourcing their IT is the exception over the past 50 years. IBM and Microsoft would not be where they are otherwise.
We also hear the lament that carriers are bit pipes that perform the commodity work of building the networks and engaging and servicing the end users while the content, infrastructure and software developers earn the higher margins and jump first on the new opportunities. There is truth there.
Nowadays carriers are shouldering the mammoth costs of making the world ready for TCP/IP everything while trying to integrate for a triple and quad play offering of Internet, phone/voice, entertainment, and mobile. And for what? So others like Google or Disney can monetize the new advertising models, Apple can sell the music and (maybe) video/TV, and Amazon can sell the rest. And so Microsoft can follow their lead and carve out the industry?
Well, what if the carriers returned to their technical roots, and began the IT pioneering work again that would allow them to keep (and sell) faster, better, cheaper underlying technology (like Google and Amazon have done so well) while leveraging standards and open source as appropriate, and while also providing strong software infrastructure products (and increasingly services) to the large enterprise BEA-type, leading adopter accounts. I think many large businesses would welcome buying software, services and support from their largest networks, telecom, and mobile providers. There's one throat to choke, and the efficiencies and discounts of volume, global purchasing. Of course, they would have to execute very well, which means they need excellent technology and technologists -- and BEA has certainly been that.
A savvy carrier that executes well -- and exploits IT rather than be disintermiated by it -- could offer some fascinating bundles of BEA-type solutions (on premises, off premises, hybrids, lo-cations, grid, virtualized) with their other business-class offerings. They could build BEA middleware-empowered appliances or platforms that could drop into these accounts and tie-in back to the optimized networks and datacenter services.
These carriers could race to SOA and SaaS benefits quickly and directly, in ways that benefit their futures -- rather than be held in the waiting as Microsoft figures out the Live world and IBM deliver business services via SOA that further disintermediates the carriers and networks providers.
I know it's a stretch, and it bucks current thinking. But something like a BEA-at&t mashup -- as long as BEA stands alone inside the maw to well-service its current and new direct software customers -- has some very interesting synergies. Remember that at&t owns Sterling Commerce, which has been doing quite well at a higher level of SOA and supply chain efficiency work.
A BEA-at&t-Sterling mashup -- an integrated and optimized hub of business ecologies and commerce -- is rather attractive on many levels. Meanwhile, the BEA software intellectual property remains to be harvested, and could be quickly expanded upon with a flush R&D budget. An acquired BEA could be the tail that wags the at&t (or other carrier) dog.
Yes, Oracle's synergies with BEA are formidable and may be worth $17 per BEA share. But an innovative, imaginative telco with a 20-year business and consumer services development horizon (with both built on a common yet differentiated technical foundation), may enjoy synergies that do place BEA at $21 per share, comfortably. It's time for telcos to master the entire IT spectrum (again) and provide full solutions, at aggressive prices. It is, after all, about the ability to deliver the goods through the pipe that counts.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
Time appears on Oracle's side in increasingly spooky BEA bid
It's getting late, many couples have embraced and moved on to the snug parlor. One pretty but aging player stands on the dance floor, and only one partner so far has stepped onto the parquet with an outstretched hand.
As the music winds down, as the richer prospects don't appear at the ball, our player still chooses to wait for sweeter succor. The grinning suitor pulls the hand back a bit, yet remains poised on the floor ... waiting as the night grows cold, waiting as the crowd thins, knowing that time must surely be on their side.
And so we have the Oracle solicitation of BEA Systems. By its actions, the BEA board's decision not to take Oracle's offer of $17 per share -- yet not to entirely dismiss the offer -- has left BEA in a limbo state that will only deteriorate its chances as time goes on. Activist investor Carl Icahn holds the orchestra's baton, and has let it be known that the music cannot go on much longer.
Even as ICahn has called to place our belle up for crass auction, another bell tolls for BEA. That is, as the quarter wears on and BEA's sales and business development activities are soured by the specter of a pending ownership change, the value of the company will probably begin to trail off, and could plunge.
Why? Because all of BEA's competitors -- not the least of which are IBM and Red Hat -- will be making merry mischief in the enterprise accounts. While Oracle and BEA stare each other down on the metaphorical dance floor, the whisperings of FUD are getting louder and clearer in the background.
How many contracts will be put on hold until this clears up? How many fewer BEA salespeople will make their numbers this quarter while the intrigue persists? How many savvy IT buyers will demand aggressive terms to close sooner rather than later?
BEA is between a rock and hard place, and time will only benefit Oracle, which knows the game well and has proven its tenacity and cunning in the not-distant past with PeopleSoft and Siebel. Tick tock, The Raven ... Poe's slow creep of inevitability and the dank chill of nevermore harsh reality.
If BEA spurns Oracle too much, and any deal appears entirely lost, the BEA stock plunges back down toward $11 per share, or an awkward auction. That's the rock. The hard place is that as Oracle stays in the game but refuses to budge from its $17 per share offer for weeks and weeks, with enough time for the short-term market conditions to work their decomposition effects against BEA. If its sales and pipeline numbers flag as it nears its next quarterly SEC filings, Oracle may be able to set its offer even lower. Investors may flee, driving the price down more. Oracle retracts and offers lower. And so on. BEA will simply be worth less over time. Investors will demand clarity.
To rescue itself from this fate, if BEA works the street hard to prop up sales in the near terms, it will have to do so with incentives and price-cuts -- which will hurt revenues while propping up contracts and deals. Tick Tock ... nevermore. The result in investors eyes will be nearly the same.
Yes, BEA only has a limited period of time to play hard to get. And that time is only in the matter of weeks or very few months. During that time, Oracle has no downside but to wait, watch, make mischief in the field -- and let IBM, TIBCO, Red Hat, and Microsoft do the rest ... nevermore.
The BEA salesepeople, whose near-term diligence may only pay off in the form of a pink slip anyway, are especially vulnerable. How will they respond? Is this dance actually on the parquet of the Titanic for them?
Without the outside chance of a white knight swooping in to pluck Belle BEA off of the dance floor of discontent, Oracle is a Halloween trick that remain less likely to further tempt with additional treats. And Oracle will still get what it wants, probably at an even better price. It is a spooky time for BEA, to be sure ... nevermore.
As the music winds down, as the richer prospects don't appear at the ball, our player still chooses to wait for sweeter succor. The grinning suitor pulls the hand back a bit, yet remains poised on the floor ... waiting as the night grows cold, waiting as the crowd thins, knowing that time must surely be on their side.
And so we have the Oracle solicitation of BEA Systems. By its actions, the BEA board's decision not to take Oracle's offer of $17 per share -- yet not to entirely dismiss the offer -- has left BEA in a limbo state that will only deteriorate its chances as time goes on. Activist investor Carl Icahn holds the orchestra's baton, and has let it be known that the music cannot go on much longer.
Even as ICahn has called to place our belle up for crass auction, another bell tolls for BEA. That is, as the quarter wears on and BEA's sales and business development activities are soured by the specter of a pending ownership change, the value of the company will probably begin to trail off, and could plunge.
Why? Because all of BEA's competitors -- not the least of which are IBM and Red Hat -- will be making merry mischief in the enterprise accounts. While Oracle and BEA stare each other down on the metaphorical dance floor, the whisperings of FUD are getting louder and clearer in the background.
How many contracts will be put on hold until this clears up? How many fewer BEA salespeople will make their numbers this quarter while the intrigue persists? How many savvy IT buyers will demand aggressive terms to close sooner rather than later?
BEA is between a rock and hard place, and time will only benefit Oracle, which knows the game well and has proven its tenacity and cunning in the not-distant past with PeopleSoft and Siebel. Tick tock, The Raven ... Poe's slow creep of inevitability and the dank chill of nevermore harsh reality.
If BEA spurns Oracle too much, and any deal appears entirely lost, the BEA stock plunges back down toward $11 per share, or an awkward auction. That's the rock. The hard place is that as Oracle stays in the game but refuses to budge from its $17 per share offer for weeks and weeks, with enough time for the short-term market conditions to work their decomposition effects against BEA. If its sales and pipeline numbers flag as it nears its next quarterly SEC filings, Oracle may be able to set its offer even lower. Investors may flee, driving the price down more. Oracle retracts and offers lower. And so on. BEA will simply be worth less over time. Investors will demand clarity.
To rescue itself from this fate, if BEA works the street hard to prop up sales in the near terms, it will have to do so with incentives and price-cuts -- which will hurt revenues while propping up contracts and deals. Tick Tock ... nevermore. The result in investors eyes will be nearly the same.
Yes, BEA only has a limited period of time to play hard to get. And that time is only in the matter of weeks or very few months. During that time, Oracle has no downside but to wait, watch, make mischief in the field -- and let IBM, TIBCO, Red Hat, and Microsoft do the rest ... nevermore.
The BEA salesepeople, whose near-term diligence may only pay off in the form of a pink slip anyway, are especially vulnerable. How will they respond? Is this dance actually on the parquet of the Titanic for them?
Without the outside chance of a white knight swooping in to pluck Belle BEA off of the dance floor of discontent, Oracle is a Halloween trick that remain less likely to further tempt with additional treats. And Oracle will still get what it wants, probably at an even better price. It is a spooky time for BEA, to be sure ... nevermore.
Friday, October 26, 2007
SOA Insights analysts view IBM's information umbrella, explore SAP's Business Objects grab and define 'Guerilla SOA'
Read a full transcript. Listen to the podcast.
The latest BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, Vol. 26, provides a roundtable discussion and dissection of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)-related news and events with a panel of IT analysts and experts.
In this episode, our group examines the relationship and tension between enterprise-wide SOA and more discrete Web-Oriented Architecture -- what we like to call Guerilla SOA. We also look at the probable acquisition of Business Objects by SAP, and the recent Information On Demand conference from IBM.
Join noted IT industry analysts and experts Jim Kobielus, principal analyst at Current Analysis; Tony Baer, principal of onStrategies, and JP Morgenthal, CEO of Avorcor. Our discussion is hosted and moderated by me, Dana Gardner.
Here are some excerpts:
The latest BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, Vol. 26, provides a roundtable discussion and dissection of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)-related news and events with a panel of IT analysts and experts.
In this episode, our group examines the relationship and tension between enterprise-wide SOA and more discrete Web-Oriented Architecture -- what we like to call Guerilla SOA. We also look at the probable acquisition of Business Objects by SAP, and the recent Information On Demand conference from IBM.
Join noted IT industry analysts and experts Jim Kobielus, principal analyst at Current Analysis; Tony Baer, principal of onStrategies, and JP Morgenthal, CEO of Avorcor. Our discussion is hosted and moderated by me, Dana Gardner.
Here are some excerpts:
On WOA and 'Guerilla SOA'Read a full transcript. Listen to the podcast.
You always have two different communities -- one very active, very leading-edge groups like financial services, and then there are always on the lookout for new technologies that are going to help them do their business faster and better, doing lots of more. They are not risk averse they are willing to throw some additional capital at those projects and see what they’ll bear. Right now they are the primary community that I see that’s really gung-ho on this. ... The other group, let’s call them the moderates or the laggards, definitely view this technology as questionable. ... They still lean towards, "I want a complete application. I really don’t want to play with this stuff."
Therefore, people might be pushing it off, which relates to what IBM is doing, which is trying to make this comprehensive, more simplified, and more integrated, so that, in addition to those cutting edge organizations in such fields as financial services, this could be more palatable for the larger bell curve of enterprises. ... My concern for the industry as a whole is that people are going to view it as throwing a lot of consulting dollars down the drain and not seeing any value for it. I’ve recently joined the camp, at least academically, not in any way physically or throwing my weight behind it, but Guerrilla SOA is what I have been doing in my business. I just haven’t put a title to it.
A year or year-and–half-ago, we started seeing WOA ... and it’s also been called Enterprise Web 2.0 or Enterprise 3.0. But, it’s really putting emphasis on REST, as a way of leveraging HTTP as a Web service. And now WOA is becoming more of an emerging best practice. Guerrilla SOA better captures what it’s up to or about than WOA. ... So, this notion of an application with a REST style for building Web services based on straight HTTP and XML sort of applies to what JP has been talking about.
I'm much more in favor of small, non-enterprise oriented, focused projects that deliver value within 30 to 90 days. I see that’s the greatest value right now for using these technologies based on SOA, Web services, and the like, because the enterprise stuff is nice, but right now it is too fluid for the industry to grab hold of. It’s resulting in potential large-scale problems for companies that have no idea how to build the distribution. ... The problem with distributed environments is that very few people actually know how to manage them.
In IBM’s case, they are one of the founders of distributed computing. At their core, they understand it well, but they buy too much into their own marketing hype and don’t tell customers well enough, "Hey, look, at the core of all this, of what you’re trying to do, trying to get more agile, we lived there. We built the first computers that became agile and communicated across network."
Parts of this argument we could have had 10 years ago, the whole idea of the big umbrella vendor. If nobody wanted a big umbrella vendor and wanted best of breed, SAP would not be what it is today. I remember during the emergence of the ERP market about 10 or 12 years ago, there was a debate: “Shall we go best of breed, versus an umbrella approach?" The market has clearly spoken.
However, what you've gotten at the same time is a revolution that picked up steam with the original Borland IDEs and the popularity of bottom-up development, and was energized by the original Visual Basic. There is a powerful constituency of organizations that need Guerilla SOA and need to get it done now. It’s also behind the rise of agile development.
When you look at just the difference in style between conventional Web service and RESTful, there is a little bit of an irony. Conventional Web services were touted as a simpler alternative to an earlier incarnation of SOA, which was CORBA. This reflects a growing maturity in the field. As we started getting a little more experience working with some of those Web-services technology, we realized that maybe we didn't always need those complicated SOAP headers. So, why not dispense with that, because most of our needs right now are for simple things like fetching data.
Everybody is going to run around the corporate standard, if the corporate standard doesn’t meet their needs. It’s the actual knowledge workers, the end users. If IT can't give them what they need, they are going to find it some other way. If what the knowledge worker needs is not being funded out of capital budgets and being supported by IT, they're going to pay for it our of their monthly expenses. They are just going to grab it for free on the Internet and mash it up.
I've been focusing more on the small and mid-sized market, and these guys just want to get something done. The interesting thing is that they don’t spend their time sitting there wondering, whether they're going to do Web services or SOA. It’s more like 1,500 calls coming in a day, they’re being bombarded, and yet they still have to get stuff done. So, it’s the backlog.
Then you come in and you tell them, "Hey, in three weeks I can give you a completely new wrapper around everything you have, leave exactly what you have in place, but allow you to do everything you wanted to, the way you want to do it." At first, they say, "Right, show me." Once you show them, it opens up a non-stop flow. They get it the minute they see it.
The Web itself and the WOA and the Guerilla SOA are all part of the same trend, which is away from the need for a large corporate IT umbrella, but that you can get things done, satisfy customer needs, be innovative and agile in new markets, and can go global -- all based on not needing one big umbrella, but leveraging what’s able across a rich, fertile, open ecology.
On IBM's Information On Demand Conference
About two years ago, IBM established an organizing framework for their data management, database integration, and other data solutions, called Information On Demand, and it’s just a big catch-all for the products they already had, as well as lots of new projects they’ve been developing to address data management under the SOA big top.
IBM released 10 press releases, and even those press releases didn’t capture every nuance of every product announcement, enhancement, and initiative they've got going on. ... They announced upgrades or enhancements to their databases, data warehousing products, their master data management (MDM) products, their data integration products under the Information Server portfolio, their enterprise content management products, the FileNet products, plus the preexisting IBM content management products.
What's really interesting is the whole idea of IBM biting of more than they can chew. IBM and Oracle are among the few organizations that could pull off something like this and not be overwhelmed by it. You and I saw this several years ago when Ascential had it’s analyst conference right after the acquisition by IBM and they revealed the roadmap. What's impressed me is that it’s been a very deliberate plan.
A cornerstone of that was Information Server, the whole information-server strategy. Ascential itself was kind of a mini IBM, a company that was glued together by acquisition. What they realized was they had all these disparate tools that ultimately related to the lifecycle of data in all those different forms, and, prior to the acquisition by IBM, they had a roadmap which, I believe, was called Hawk and Serrrano.
The interesting part was that it was all going to become metadata driven and that would drive all the data-integration and data-access strategies. So, I see that as the unsung hero of all this. It provided a more global perspective IBM needed and rationalizes all of these other initiatives. It’s not that everything is acting off of Information Server as a hub, but it provides a logical core or gut unification theory.
On Business Objects and SAP
The big news there of course was the pending acquisition by SAP. One of the good things was, at the very start of the keynote, Bernard Liautaud, the founder of the Business Objects, reassured the customers, employees, and partners that Business Objects will be a standalone product group under SAP. It will autonomous. It can continue to pursue its vision. ... It will up to Business Objects whether it makes sense to use a particular piece of SAP technology in any given product, but he reassured everybody that there will be growing integration between Business Objects and SAP offerings.
But [Henning Kagermann, the Chairman of SAP] intends to have it both ways, because he then said, “We will also make sure that Business Objects maintains an equivalent level of tight integration with all of our competitors.” He's trying to have it both ways, but at least Kagermann was speaking the right speak. From my discussions afterwards, everybody said, "Yeah, I think they are speaking in good faith. So far, so good. We’ll wait and see." The deal has not been closed yet, and it will be a couple of months.
I see the convergences that are going on are all being driven by SOA mega brands that are continuing to bulk up on the full range of best-of-breed tools that enterprises are asking for. SAP, although it has BI, data warehousing, and data integration under NetWeaver, none of that is best of breed. It’s all primarily just in the box when you license their CRM or ERP applications.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Oracle users enjoy open source benefits but shy away from databases -- for now
An early
Sponsored by MySQL and conducted by Unisphere Research, the study among members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) found that, despite a heavy use of open source in some areas of operation, organizations running over half their applications on open-source software increased from 9 percent in 2006 to 13 percent in 2007. However, only one-third of the 226 respondents said they had an open-source database in production.
While slightly more than half of the respondents said they plan to increase their adoption of open source in the next year, fewer than 10 percent reported application portfolios that are supported by or interact with open-source systems.
Respondents also indicated that cost indeed seems to be a driver, with two-thirds reporting that the adoption of open source was spurred by cost savings. This compares with 57 percent citing cost as a factor in a similar study last year.
However, cost savings come at a price. Support and security continues to be concerns and seem to act as roadblocks to wider adoption. Just over half of the respondents felt that support wasn't as robust as commercial applications, and more than one-third saw security as a major stumbling block.
Tony Baer at OnStrategies has an interesting take -- and, in the process, paints a picture that will have me looking over my shoulder at Thanksgiving dinner:
By the way, did we neglect to mention that this open source survey of Oracle database customers was sponsored by MySQL? It conjures up an image of a mouse sneaking into a kitchen during Thanksgiving dinner and feasting on the scraps. In fact, that’s exactly the picture that was painted by the survey.
Open source use is wide but not terribly deep. Roughly 90% of respondents said they used open source software or were planning to, but it’s mostly for the commodity stuff sitting below the application layer where most organizations imbed their real value-add. Only 4% said they used open-source-based enterprise apps, like SugarCRM. Not surprisingly, the most popular open source offerings were the Apache web server, which happens to underlie most J2EE middle tier products like IBM WebSphere; and of course, Linux. In essence, customers look to open source for cheap plumbing that simply works.
And that certainly applies to databases. This being a survey of Oracle database users, it’s obvious that nobody’s replacing Oracle with MySQL or any of its open source cousins. But if you’ve got a satellite web app, there’s little risk – or cost – in using MySQL. Significantly, 20% of Oracle users surveyed reported having open source databases larger than 50 GBytes. That 20% is kind of a funny figure. If you’re an optimist, you’ll point to it as proof positive that open source databases are getting ready for prime time; if you’re a cynic, you’ll claim that the figure proves that they will never rise higher than supporting roles.
... Obviously, nobody dismisses the viability of open source for basic commodity tasks, but when it comes to mission critical systems, Oracle users still know whose throat they really want to choke.
Like all surveys, it represents a few answers -- 226 to be exact -- from a small niche of the IT market. That would seem to indicate caution in extrapolating the results to the entire industry.
Incidentally, the same settler who made the remark about the
In any event, I agree with Tony that open source databases are ripe for rapid growth and expand use-case scenarios. As more applications are served up as services, those service providers will be doing a lot of custom distributed infrastructure development, leveraging open source, and rolling their own functionally targeted stacks. Think of Google, Amazon, eBay and Yahoo as examples. Are they running Oracle or DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server, or are they taking a more commoditized view on databases?
Therefore the actual numbers of open source database licenses might be small and hard to measure, but the impact will be felt as more applications and services move to service provider models and more infrastructure customization as differentiation is layered on top of the database itself. Some folks swear by Ingres as a fine data environment, albeit open source.
And because databases are so mission critical, once comfort using open source varieties of these bedrocks of infrastructure components are reached, then a tipping point may be at hand. This may also be accelerated by moves toward Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) and so-called Guerrilla SOA, where instances of services are virtualized on discrete runtime stacks.
Virtualization using open source hypervisors and open source databases to produce combined dynamic data serving stacks (create data capacity as you need it) also makes a lot of sense. It does mean more than what Oracle does with RAC and striping.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Sybase ushers in iPhone as secure client for mainstream corporate email
When I saw the demo last summer it was impressive. Sybase used its Information Anywhere suite as a go-between to allow such corporate email stalwarts as IBM Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange to integrate with a mobile Apple iPhone for email and PIM.
Now the demo is set to become a commercial reality. Sybase today at Mobile Business Expo in New York announced that it will begin supporting the iPhone as a wireless client for Domino and Exchange email and PIM/address book (including corporate directory look-up) early next year.
The iAnywhere approach comes with full connectivity to the native iPhone email application, not via webmail in the Safari browser. The email is therefore also available for offline use.
While the Sybase announcement comes soon after Apple's publicly declared intention to allow third-party developers and ISVs to write native apps for the iPhone, Sybase said the announcements are unrelated to the forthcoming SDK.
"We took guidance from Apple" on the project to include iPhone as a client among some 200 others that Information Anywhere suite connects (such as Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm-based devices), but there is no formal relationship between Sybase and Apple, said Senthil Krishnapillai, Sybase product manager for iAnywhere.
The Information Anywhere suite connects mobile clients to email systems using standards, but not IMAP, which many email administrators shun do to potential unfettered exposure of email traffic to the Internet. Those using the Sybase solution for making the iPhone a corporate email client will be able to use their mobile networks to securely synchronize and replicate their emails, said Krishnapillai.
The Sybase approach will work with any iPhone and supports all Domino versions from R6 through the new version 8, as well as Exchange 2000 through Exchange 2007. The solution will require the iAnywhere suite 5.5, however. The iPhone-iAnywhere solution is expected in Q1 2008.
We should also expect that Sybase will enable 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.
What's more, it should take about five minutes to set up a user, following the same basic steps as setting up a Windows Mobile connection, said Sybase. This should make email administrators breathe easier as iPhone users request connectivity privileges.
Sybase said that 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 will soon be available in several markets.
Quite a bit more integration could be done between iPhone and corporate email. Microsoft might not be too keen on it, but IBM should be.
If you're a Domino shop, send an email to your IBM support staff and ask if Big Blue will use the forthcoming iPhone SDK to provide more native integration, perhaps between the Domino/Notes calendar and the native calendar client on iPhone. Web access could work in the meantime, I suppose.
But wait ... how about running a Notes client directly on the iPhone? Hey, how about running Outlook on the iPhone? These would be some killer apps should users clamor enough for them (and/or hackers make up the difference). I won't hold my breathe on Outlook, but maybe one of the open source Outlook knock-offs, eh?
If I were IBM, however, I'd think very seriously about a native Notes client for iPhone (and for all the other iPhone wannabe converged devices that are making their way to the market). A Notes client, of course, would allow the mobile iPhone users to get a lot more to their fingertips than email and calendar -- there are many thousands of Domino applications and data views that would make the iPhone a very handsome corporate endpoint.
Come on, IBM and Apple how about it? Sybase has shown the way, now take the ball and run with it. Notes and iPhone is match made in heaven.
Should IBM and Apple work together to bring a Notes client to the iPhone?
Now the demo is set to become a commercial reality. Sybase today at Mobile Business Expo in New York announced that it will begin supporting the iPhone as a wireless client for Domino and Exchange email and PIM/address book (including corporate directory look-up) early next year.
The iAnywhere approach comes with full connectivity to the native iPhone email application, not via webmail in the Safari browser. The email is therefore also available for offline use.
While the Sybase announcement comes soon after Apple's publicly declared intention to allow third-party developers and ISVs to write native apps for the iPhone, Sybase said the announcements are unrelated to the forthcoming SDK.
"We took guidance from Apple" on the project to include iPhone as a client among some 200 others that Information Anywhere suite connects (such as Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm-based devices), but there is no formal relationship between Sybase and Apple, said Senthil Krishnapillai, Sybase product manager for iAnywhere.
The Information Anywhere suite connects mobile clients to email systems using standards, but not IMAP, which many email administrators shun do to potential unfettered exposure of email traffic to the Internet. Those using the Sybase solution for making the iPhone a corporate email client will be able to use their mobile networks to securely synchronize and replicate their emails, said Krishnapillai.
The Sybase approach will work with any iPhone and supports all Domino versions from R6 through the new version 8, as well as Exchange 2000 through Exchange 2007. The solution will require the iAnywhere suite 5.5, however. The iPhone-iAnywhere solution is expected in Q1 2008.
We should also expect that Sybase will enable 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.
What's more, it should take about five minutes to set up a user, following the same basic steps as setting up a Windows Mobile connection, said Sybase. This should make email administrators breathe easier as iPhone users request connectivity privileges.
Sybase said that 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 will soon be available in several markets.
Quite a bit more integration could be done between iPhone and corporate email. Microsoft might not be too keen on it, but IBM should be.
If you're a Domino shop, send an email to your IBM support staff and ask if Big Blue will use the forthcoming iPhone SDK to provide more native integration, perhaps between the Domino/Notes calendar and the native calendar client on iPhone. Web access could work in the meantime, I suppose.
But wait ... how about running a Notes client directly on the iPhone? Hey, how about running Outlook on the iPhone? These would be some killer apps should users clamor enough for them (and/or hackers make up the difference). I won't hold my breathe on Outlook, but maybe one of the open source Outlook knock-offs, eh?
If I were IBM, however, I'd think very seriously about a native Notes client for iPhone (and for all the other iPhone wannabe converged devices that are making their way to the market). A Notes client, of course, would allow the mobile iPhone users to get a lot more to their fingertips than email and calendar -- there are many thousands of Domino applications and data views that would make the iPhone a very handsome corporate endpoint.
Come on, IBM and Apple how about it? Sybase has shown the way, now take the ball and run with it. Notes and iPhone is match made in heaven.
Should IBM and Apple work together to bring a Notes client to the iPhone?
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