Who are your top competitors? When you talk about who can compete with Sybase on wireless and data expertise, IBM can. It can do the data management. On the mobile side, they are a little late to it, but they have some of the products. They don't have our recognized leadership, but they have the services arm to bring it together. Oracle [has] not focused on mobility. Microsoft comes at it primarily from an OS or application perspective. They're there and they're loud, but usually it's with a partner. [Research In Motion Ltd.] has strong brand recognition, which they hope to leverage beyond e-mail. But does RIM to have expertise in back-end enterprise data management? I don't think so.
Do most CIOs view mobility as something more than providing BlackBerry devices to the sales force? There is some of that. But now we're seeing pretty broad-based extensions of all back-end apps. That's a real change over 2004 and late 2003, when it was primarily mobile e-mail.
Take Nielsen Media Research, which is a longtime data customer of ours. They have a database on TV media viewing habits that gets sent out to advertisers. They used to send out that info once a month on CD-ROM. We helped them so today, any customer can access the data with a desktop, laptop, PDA or smart phone and make much faster buying decisions.
We helped McDonald's enable its managers to go to a store and check that it is in compliance with normal franchise standards ... they can look at the inventory, look at the overall health of that site and catalog all of that information -- and get it back to corporate fast.
Hyundai retail stores in Korea extended their point-of-sale systems onto wireless devices. They don't have any checkout counters anymore -- they have someone who comes up when you're ready, swipes your cart, and checks you out -- while trying to upsell you based on your purchases and information on your shopping habits.
We helped a company, C.H. Robinson, that supplies produce to large supermarkets. It wanted to RFID-tag all of their goods to reduce spoilage and move it more efficiently. They selected Sybase for the tag readers and the middleware so they could make real-time decisions.
Are there any consumer trends foreshadowing enterprise wireless applications? People talk about location-specific applications, like a service on our cell phone that helps us find a nearby restaurant. I think you'll see businesses try to leverage that model. The other one is natural language interfaces, where you can just talk to your phone and ask for what you want. Putting both together, you can imagine a salesperson wanting updated sales info from [a] client location they are at. Rather than scrolling through 25 screens on their device, they could say, "Please give me the latest information for all my accounts in Dublin, Calif." And it will parse that out into database queries and deliver it to you on the device.
A lot of times, I get asked whether there is going to be a killer app for wireless that will make the market inflect. We are seeing very steady 20 percent + growth, which I think is going to continue. There will be some small companies that will figure out how to use wireless to leapfrog their competitors, like the way Amazon.com and eBay learned to use the Web better. We just hope they're using Sybase when they do it.
What is the state of Sybase's original core business -- databases? We launched ASE 15 last year. We can now encrypt all of the data inside ASE. Our competitors like Oracle encrypt data on the outside. But as it sits in an Oracle database? Not encrypted.
Our [ASE] users are investment banks, huge trading houses, the NSA, the CIA, so we spend a lot of time on security. Security was one reason we announced 640 new ASE customers in 2005. Forty percent of those wins were in China, where we are No. 2. We're not competing with any legacy brand perceptions there. It's a flat-out bake-off, and Sybase is winning more than its share there. In the U.S. or Europe, where it's a battle to get somebody to swap out, it's much much harder. Ingres will run into this, because people just do not rip out databases.
However, people do add databases. I often hear from customers, "I have enough Oracle. I don't need any more Oracle." That's where we come in. We have always had the lowest TCO [total cost of ownership] database on the market. Always. And we maintain that leadership.
Are you cost-competitive with the open-source databases? Open source is just another business model: Get as many users on your free offering and convert that into paid support. That business model has been co-opted by the larger vendors, including us. We have Sybase ASE Express Edition. It is better than MySQL, better than Ingres. We have had 45,000 downloads of Express, and a lot of that converted into business.
I had one big customer call and thank us for making Express free. He had a lot of MySQL in his company, and he wasn't comfortable with it. He said: "I don't want my people playing around with that thing, because it will never get into production."
Another misnomer about open source is that it's free innovation. We have 1,200 engineers. And we're a lot smaller than Oracle. The reality is that the proprietary vendors are more innovative than the open-source guys.
IBM recently liberalized the usage restrictions on its free version of DB2. Would you do the same? I think we would. I can't right now identify what it would be. We'll adapt with the times on that, for sure.
What's your strategy for increasing your 5 percent share of the overall relational database market? Our mobility strategy has brought lots of customers who had never done business with us before. Being treated as a strategic vendor on mobile data management is giving us the opportunity to come in there and start talking about our value on the data management side.
With our ASE 15 launch, we have completely stabilized the 5 percent we do own. The issue is, Can we grow that 5 percent? We can grow it in geographies where they are not still worried about legacy brand perception. We'll continue to innovate and at least hold our own. Database is still the largest software segment in the world. So if we have 5 percent, that's not a bad place to be.