Day 2/ Session

Empowering the CIO

Prashant Tewari, Country Manager - Enterprise Sales, Sybase cited some prominent success stories of institutions and companies that have benefited from deploying his company's products

Tewari started off by talking about Sybase as a company and how it had over 34,000 business users across the world, over 4,000 employees in 32 countries, a dedicated R&D Center in Pune, $1.13 bn in FY 2008 Revenue, 12 years of consistent growth in India where it had 350 employees and 500+ customers including over 50 customer acquisitions in India in the past year.

He touched upon the fact that Sybase has strong IP with 30 product releases, 14 patents, and it spends over 15% of its revenue on R&D. Sybase focuses upon five markets namely Data Management, Mobile Enterprise, Analytics, Hosted Services and mCommerce.

Next he talked about the company’s vision which is to deliver enterprise software to manage, analyze and mobilize information. Mobilize refers to secure, anytime, anywhere information distribution. Manage is about managing high volumes of various kinds of data in transaction intensive environments. Analyze is all about analyzing large volumes of data with superior speed and agility.

In terms of data management the company offers a variety of solutions to securely manage and move mission-critical data.

For Enterprises, there’s ASE which handles data management and is platform optimized for mission-critical, high performance transaction processing environments. For the Remote & Embedded market, Sybase offers enterprise-class data management for mission-critical frontline applications and remote/embedded computing by means of its SQL Anywhere solution. For the mobile market which Sybase defines with the term Movement, it has MobiLink Replication Server that supports two-way wireless synchronization and real-time heterogeneous replication. Lastly, for Tooling it has PowerDesigner, PowerBuilder and WorkSpace, which bring to the table modeling, design and data management tools for business processes and applications.

He talked about some of Sybase’s customers in India including the Bombay Stock Exchange that has been running its settlements application for the past 12 years on the ASE database and Replication Server Technology from Sybase.

Now BSE has built its Currency Derivatives Exchange application also using Sybase ASE.

The key benefit here has been that the Data Replication and Synchronization features of Sybase Replication Server have helped achieve operational efficiency and continuous data availability across multiple locations.

Another success story cited was that of the Indian Railways National Train Enquiry System. Indian Railways replicates data to a mix of databases in five geographical zones across the country, enabling passengers to have real-time information at their fingertips. To allow the general public and customer service representatives that respond to train-status requests over the phone to quickly check on each train, Indian Railways deployed five Sybase ASE servers across five geographical zones within the country. The key benefits here have been that this system provides real-time arrival and departure status of 6,000 passenger trains across India’s national transportation system. It replicates data bi-directionally quickly and reliably and transfers data efficiently among heterogeneous databases including Sybase, Oracle and Microsoft. As many as 1.2 million transactions per day are transferred and this has been happening 24x7x365 for more than eight years. It supports a heterogeneous environment as it is hardware and is platform independent.

He cited some of the acclaim that Sybase has received from analysts and some of its achievements. Sybase has the leading column-oriented analytics server. It has been rated as a Challenger in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Data Warehousing DBMS, 2008. Sybase has created a 1 petabyte data warehouse proving Sybase IQ’s scalability with 90% less energy consumption and 91% less CO2 emissions. The

Guinness Book of World Records, 2007 recognized the company for creating the World’s Largest Data Warehouse.

He cited yet another customer case study, this one of ICICI Bank which has been a pioneer in implementing a data warehousing solution in banking circles. The enterprise-wide data warehouse at ICICI bank is powered by Sybase IQ. The key benefits cited for this deployment were data compression by over 60%, leveraging scalability owing to its open system architecture, achieving trickle-feed loading, support for simultaneous loading and querying, support for over 150 concurrent users, a reduction in downtime thanks to 24x7 availability, a significant uptick in query performance and response time, lower cost of maintenance and TCO etc.

Then there was the story of Spice Telecom; by using Sybase IQ, Spice maintains a 12 terabyte data warehouse populated with three months of customer call data. Spice runs advanced multi-dimensional analytics on the information to identify sources of revenue loss and uncover gaps in its service offerings. The data warehouse has lowered costs, improved data quality, increased their competitive edge, and fostered exceptional growth.

The benefits here included a 10x improvement in performance, Spice gained the ability to analyze data sets that was not previously possible, the time taken for running a query came down from hours and days to mere minutes, storage needs shrank by 50%, ad hoc queries are supported and data warehouse access was given to all departments.

Moving on to the Mobilize part of Sybase’s vision, he cited the example of the Bank of Baroda which is employing Sybase 365’s Application Manager technology so that its customers across India are now able to enquire about loan services by texting the keyword ‘loan’ to shortcode 6365. Bank of Baroda has plans to extend the service, and to roll out similar mobile banking services with Sybase 365 to reach account holders abroad. The bank benefited from the real-time delivery of mobile enquiry services via any host operator, it gained a convenient method for reaching a large customer base, costs came down and employees were freed up to deal with genuine customers, and the system supports timeless and seamless message delivery regardless of operator.

Another bank that took advantage of Sybase’s Mobilize technology was United Bank of India whose customers are in a position to enquire about the Bank’s suite of financial services by texting a service keyword to shortcode 6365. All leads generated via SMS are captured by Sybase 365’s Application Manager. The application platform is directly linked to United Bank of India’s central database system. The benefits here include real-time delivery of pull-based SMS enquiry services via any host operator and enhanced CRM in addition to the benefits mentioned in the previous example.