Sybase Inc.?s growing venture into the hot market of radio frequency identification (RFID) is a logical development of the company?s activity in the mobile data space, says Sydney-based marketing manager Julie Christie.

Sybase sees its strength in ?getting information from anywhere to anywhere with our integration tools,? she says, so it perceives a natural role in ?helping to makes sense of collected RFID information and integrate it with other business systems like inventory and back end applications.?

Sybase"s ?Open Database Schema and Persistence Layer? automates the loading of RFID data into any SQL database and provides a specialized RFID database schema, which can, for example, associate the identifiers of individual packages with the identifier of the pallet on which they are loaded.

Sybase has established partnerships under its Business Solutions Alliance program with major manufacturers of RFID devices, including Symbol, Intermec and others, Christie says.

The RFID software venture has been established under the banner of Sybase?s mobile database, middleware and device management subsidiary, iAnywhere Solutions.

On the strength of its mobile device management expertise, iAnywhere launched RFID Anywhere in the US in February. This is ?a platform that helps enterprises plan, develop, deploy and manage RFID networks,? Christie says.

Last week, Sybase released RFID Enterprise which extends the integration components of RFID Anywhere by providing automatic RFID data persistence and facilitating business process and data integration on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) model.