Mobility in Australia is Challenging



Snake is 5 meters (15 feet) long
Click Image to Enlarge

I had the privilege of speaking at a conference in Australia this week and spending time with many utilities and construction companies.  The challenges in Australia can be highlighted by this image of a snake, provided by Jeff Morgan from Electrix taken from the window of a utility vehicle in Australia.  This snake is of a very aggressive and deadly nature.  I was also intrigued by the many spider stories that were shared by the field engineers that I spent time with this week.  Seems spiders really like electrical meter boxes.

In addition to the biting and stinging variety of challenges, there are many connectivity challenges in a country as big and remote as Australia.  It doesn't take long to lose connectivity once you leave the main roads in Australia.  Companies use specialized radios and satellite phones and up-links a lot in this region. 

Any mission critical mobile application such as field services and enterprise asset management needs to be designed to work equally well connected or disconnected from the Internet in Australia.  That takes databases on the mobile client, syncing technology and back office integration.  In other words, these kinds of mobile solutions are naturals for Sybase's SUP and SQL Anywhere architecture.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst, SAP Mentor Volunteer

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility Group

Read The Mobility News Weekly

Read The M2M News Monthly

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Discussions About Sybase's Embedded Mobile Database Business, Part 2

In Part 1 of this article I shared a conversation I had with Sybase's Tom Slee on mobile embedded databases and Sybase's SQL Anywhere.  One of the questions I asked him was where SQL Anywhere fits in the SUP (Sybase Unwired Platform) picture.  Tom said SQL Anywhere databases, syncing and integration technologies are all in SUP, but they are only a small subset of what SUP offers.

SQL Anywhere is often embedded in other ISV mobile solutions.  The end customer often does not even realize that Sybase technology is embedded in their mobile solution.   ISV partners will often develop all kinds of complex business rules, logic and code that accesses the SQL Anywhere database and utilizes the syncing technology, but it is buried in the application.  That is how my team used it.

SUP in turn is meant to be a complete end-to-end mobile middleware solution that connects back office databases to mobile applications.  Is is far more than just SQL Anywhere.  SUP includes all kinds of additional features to bring it all together in a manner that can be used by an IT organization, not just C++ programmers.

I also asked Tom how mobile application developers synchronize mobile applications that are developed in HTML5 and that use the SQL Lite database with back office systems.  He said simple mobile applications with limited syncing requirements could use web services, custom scripts or other custom developed syncing schemes.  He added that some mobile applications may store data, but have no need to sync with back office systems.  An examples could be a note taking application.  You may want to write notes and save them, but perhaps there is no need to sync the notes with an enterprise system.

When would a developer want to use HTML5, but use Sybase's SQL Anywhere database and syncing technologies rather than the free SQL Lite?  Tom said many enterprise class mobile applications need to synchronize data all day long in near real-time, with multiple databases, web services and ERPs.  Some of the data sources are dynamic and must be synchronized in near real time, others are static and need to be updated only weekly.  All of these different synchronization needs must happen seamlessly in the background and the mobile application must run smoothly whether online or offline.  This situation begs for a mature mobile middleware layer like SQL Anywhere.

To develop your own custom synchronization engine and middleware from scratch to efficiently and accurately manage complex synchronization scenarios is a huge and expensive task.  These are the kinds of situations that motivated me to become an ISV/OEM partner of Sybase and to use their SQL Anywhere technology years ago.  Those same kinds of motivations exist today.

The way I understand it is that software companies that want to develop mobile applications with embedded databases and syncing technology may prefer SQL Anywhere, but an IT organization looking to support all of their enterprise's mobility solutions and needs would look to SUP as their comprehensive mobile middleware solution.

Do you agree or disagree?  Is my understanding correct?  Please comment below if my understanding in incorrect.  THANKS!

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst, SAP Mentor Volunteer

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility Group

Read The Mobility News Weekly

Read The M2M News Monthly

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Discussions About Sybase's Embedded Mobile Database Business, Part 1

SQL Anywhere

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking with Tom Slee at Sybase.  Tom works out of the Sybase office in Waterloo, Ontario.  We have known of each other professionally for many years, as I was the CEO of a mobile application company that partnered with Sybase.  Yesterday we discussed many different subjects including, HTML5, SQL Anywhere, SQL Lite, SUP, mobile application development strategies, data synchronization and the most interesting developments in the embedded mobile database areas at Sybase. 

Tom had commented on an article I wrote several weeks back questioning the role of embedded mobile databases in a future with HTML5 and SQL Lite.  He had corrected me by saying SQL Lite is very often used with HTML5, but that it was not an "official" part of the HTML5 standard.  I stand corrected.  However, yesterday he added that SQL Lite is an unofficial part of HTML5 for many developers.

My questions several weeks ago were directed at learning if developers would continue to need and to purchase Sybase's SQL Anywhere embedded mobile databases (RDBMS) if there was a free option that works with HTML5 called SQL Lite.  Tom provided me with a much greater understanding of this issue which I will share to the best of my abilities.

SQL Lite working with HTML5 enables developers to store data on mobile devices.  This is very useful when developers want to save data entered into a mobile application, record the state of a mobile application, or record where the user is in an application.  Developers can also store product catalogs and all kinds of other data in this database.  It is a very good solution when there is no need, or limited need to synchronize the mobile application data back to an enteprise database.