30 minute interview

“With IQ on Linux, companies can potentially save up to 50 percent on licencing or hardware costs”

Linda Jarvis Director of Engineering Sybase

*What trends do you see in the data warehousing market?

I think the concept of an interactive warehouse is finding many takers. We sensed this trend by tuning the components of our architecture to support our interactive warehouse strategy. For example, we spent a lot of effort in creating an architecture that will have the capability to represent data from different vendors in a single view. Today, our architecture allows us to collect data from numerous sources such as legacy and mainframe databases, applications and external data sources. Organisations can also apply transformations and conversion logic to present the data in useful business terms. End-users can access the data from standard query and reporting tools or applications.

*Are databases moving into data warehousing?

Our application helps unlock data trapped in a company’s legacy systems and helps the customer to get a consistent view of data across the organisation. Sybase IQ, our data warehousing suite, can store data from individual data marts in a single warehouse, depending on the company’s needs. This solution offloads data in a minimally intrusive way from an online transaction platform, mainframe or data mart, using Sybase’s Replication Server, and gives access to users in the format they require. Further, our analysis and tracking system can take information from any application and combine it into a single data warehouse. The only challenge we see is getting people to agree on the kind of data that goes into the warehouse and sorting all the inter-relations between data in the warehouse. Once that is completed, a report can be generated using stored procedures. In this country, organisations such as Indian Railways and The Stock Exchange, Mumbai, use Sybase IQ.

*How important and significant is the focus on open architecture?

We support data access from Sybase SQL Server to data sources such as Oracle, DB2, Informix and flat files. It can even be accessed from a wide range of popular, off-the-shelf query tools such as Business Objects and Cognos.

*How important is Linux to the Sybase IQ strategy?

Linux helps lower the TCO for our customers and gives an opportunity to extend the product into smaller companies. Last year, we announced the availability of Sybase IQ 12.5 on Linux. It addresses issues regarding data security, availability, reliability and scalability. TCO is the most crucial part, as by using IQ on a Linux platform, companies can potentially save up to 50 percent on licencing or hardware costs. IQ on Linux provides scalability and performance on lower-cost platforms.

*Sybase has been talking about the unwired enterprise. Can you tell us how your company has been positioning mobile databases in your overall strategy?

Wireless is a trend that is catching on in a big way over here, and we see Indian companies ensuring that their infrastructure is in tune with global mobility trends. The mobile database space is a niche but exploding segment in India. Globally, companies have already begun to look at mobile applications such as sales force automation, and this is beginning to happen here too. The mobile database is designed for providing database functionality in embedded and mobile environments. It makes eminent sense for a sales force that is out on the field to have the flexibility to access data from enterprise applications. We are looking to play in this segment by combining our strengths in databases, data management and middleware solutions to offer a value proposition to customers wanting to go mobile. We call this strategy Unwired Enterprise, which has all the components organisations need to go wireless. Ultimately, Unwired Enterprise is about information flowing freely across any platform, which includes everything from mobile databases, middleware, synchronisation and management software.

Venkatesh Ganesh