Sybase plans to invest $25 million over the next year to make using public wireless LAN networks more cost-effective and reliable
for accessing enterprise applications, it announced Tuesday.
Public wireless networks using 802.11 or Wi-Fi technology, though a boon to the mobile worker, are problematic, as access
points are still few and far between and continuous use of the wireless network will soon drain the batteries of portable
devices, according to Brian Vink, vice president of marketing at Sybase subsidiary iAnywhere Solutions. Roaming among access
points, which can involve changing IP addresses, can also cause difficulties for the novice user, he said.
Sybase will invest some of that $25 million in building a network of competency centers for Wi-Fi research, the first of which
will be hosted at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario. The company also intends to collaborate with its software
development partners to embed Sybase technology in their applications for mobile devices.
Vink highlighted three areas of concern for this software development effort: application persistence over different network
connections; network security, and local caching of data.
Roaming from one wireless access point to another will usually result in the mobile device being given a new IP address for
each network; servers need to be able to locate the device at its new address and maintain the connection and application
state through that change. That requires special attention to the software on both client and server, he said.
Support for the forthcoming Wi-Fi Protected Access security standards will be rolled into Sybase software as they are ratified,
Vink said.
Although Sybase can't do anything about the battery capacity of the average laptop, there are software tricks, such as caching
server data on the client, that can make better use of that energy and simplify roaming, Vink said. "The main thing we provide
is this always-available architecture," he said. This draws application data from a local cache when there is no network connection
and synchronizes it automatically with the server when a connection is available. That means the wireless connection does
not need to be turned on the whole time.
Vink expects the software developed in this program to be used with enterprise applications from the likes of Oracle and IBM.
"We would support enterprise databases from them, but the software that supports the mobility is ours. I would see us as part
of the plumbing that allows the software to be deployed in a remote environment," he said.
E-mail
Printer Friendly
Reprints
(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
