On Monday Quadbase Systems Inc. and Sybase Inc. announced that they were working together to provide charting and reporting to transactional systems and applications powered by Adaptive Server Enterprise, Sybase’s enterprise-class relational database management system. This is just part of Sybase’s Apple strategy, Steve Bertges, vice president of the company’s Macintosh Business Unit, told MacCentral.
Quadbase will integrate Quadbase EspressReport, a Java reporting tool, with Sybase ASE, and Apple’s WebObjects 5.2. The integration is designed to enable developers to create reporting solutions and present information from multiple applications and data sources in real-time.
In the past Sybase offered client side products for Mac OS 9, but no server products. That changed with the coming of Mac OS X.
“Mac OS X is such a close relation to UNIX that it was easier to look at the Mac market economically,” Bertges said. “The engineering and support costs are closer to our traditional support costs and structure. In recent years, the debut of Mac OS X, the release of more powerful machines from Apple, and lower prices led us to believe that it was time for an enterprise level database management system that would take advantage of Mac OS X and the G4 architecture.”
Sybase saw its entry into this arena as a way to complement existing database managers out there from companies such as FileMaker and 4D. Those firms and Sybase have worked in tandem in recent months, Bertges said. In fact, the recent announcement of working with Quadbase is just part of Sybase’s plans to cooperate with businesses that offer products that complement their own, he added.
“We would like to work with a security backup vendor and may be talking with one or two companies in this area,” Bertges said.
They also plan to recruit VAR (Value Added Resellers) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) vendors. Sybase is also talking with content management vendors, collaborative workflow companies, and others.
“We like to manage data wherever it sits,” Darryl Salas, Sybase’s Apple alliance manager, said. “The Mac is a robust platform, and we saw a need we could fill. About 70 percent of all server sales are because of database applications, either homegrown or packaged. We think Sybase’s place in the Mac market is important for us and good for Apple.”
Look for Sybase to have a large presence at the 2003 Worldwide Developers Conference. WWDC will run June 23-27 in San Francisco.