The Bloor Perspective: New mobile interface, collaboration and Sybase

Until recently the user interfaces available on mobile phones have been relatively similar. Radical deviations in styling aside, few companies seem to be tackling the usability issues of increasingly complex mobile communications devices. There have been some valiant attempts at voice control and another PC crossover, short cuts. All you have to remember is something simple like '*52#' instead of trawling menus.

But is there another way? Enter the motion-controlled smartphone. The concept, called mydevice from Finnish company MyOrigo, is designed to radically change the user experience with their mobile phone. It's based on a binary portable, language-independent, multimedia platform from Tao Group, called intent. The phone functionality is aimed at both business and consumer use with the de rigour tri-band support, web browsing, scheduling, email, camera, MP3 player and Java. But it is the approach to the user interface that makes this different. The two main aspects cover motion control and 'touch & feel' technologies. With the 176 x 320 pixel colour display, motion control allows the user to scroll, zoom and change aspect from portrait to landscape at the swivel of the wrist. Paging through on screen documents is simply a matter of flicking the page corner to generate a 'next page' instruction, and panning across large documents or web pages is accomplished by thinking of the device like a mirror and the document as your reflection. So if you want to pan to the left, you tilt the device to the left and so on. The touch and feel technology has two benefits. First you feel feedback from the screen when you 'depress' a key. Second, there's no need for a stylus, a finger will do. The feedback from the screen should give back some of the pointing accuracy lost by the width of the average user's fingers. This may seem overly radical in today's cautious markets but smart mobile phones are becoming so crammed with new services that the old user interface models of PC and desk phone can't cope. Intelligently written applications will help but poor user experience will dampen long-term interest in new services. MyOrigo expects mydevice to appear in volume in the UK in the autumn. *An end to throwing things over the wall?*

Collaboration functions are being woven into the fabric of an organisation's infrastructure. IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are all rolling out enterprise scale collaboration suites, application vendors such as PeopleSoft and SAP are embedding collaboration, and document management and portal vendors have added collaboration capabilities. But before we get carried away with the availability of collaboration software, it's imperative to understand how it delivers benefits. The most significant benefit is increasing the speed of a project because speed not only reduces project costs but also delivers the increased revenue or the cost savings sooner. Collaboration increases the speed of execution of a project in several ways. Web conferencing and instant messaging allow people to have meetings sooner because shorter meetings without travel are easier to fit into diaries. Virtual workspaces co-ordinate activities more closely when a team is dispersed, in different departments and in different time zones. It may be harder to persuade project managers that collaboration technologies deliver increased team productivity. As they will correctly see it, a distributed project increases the level and formality of communications required. But they can often overestimate the level of project communication even in the same building. Few projects take place in a single room and communication is known to decline rapidly as projects are divided between the rooms and floors of the same building. Project team members don't spend enough time making sure their documentation is up to date. This is where a virtual workplace delivers value. Virtual workplaces save time and avoid the waste of 'reinventing the wheel' by gathering all the information needed in one place and having everyone on 'the same page'. As a result, there is more engagement between the team members and people no longer 'throw things over the wall'. Productivity also suffers when a team is not well balanced in personalities or skills. Collaboration tools let project managers choose the best combination of skills and personalities for the team regardless of their location. As a bonus, scarce experts can be more easily shared between projects. The result is that staff spend less time kicking their heels waiting for a suitable project and organisations can make better use of offshore staff. When most of a project's costs are people costs, even a small increase in productivity can deliver big savings. Web conferencing can make a big reduction in the waste of time and money spent travelling to meetings. However dedicated a road warrior is to working on the road, travelling creates a lot of dead time. Hard figures for the benefits of collaboration are difficult to come by as collaboration practices are only emerging in most organisations. A study of the use of collaboration in the construction industry for Constructware indicated that the most important benefit was in the increased productivity and speed of turnaround that collaboration delivered. A very high proportion of respondents (94 per cent) also said that document management was improved with three quarters (79 per cent) saying that collaboration tools had saved them significant time spent in creating, filing and searching for documents. These are the benefits of getting everyone on the same page. IBM is a keen user of its own collaboration technologies. IBM staff send three million internal instant messages every day and IBM's use of web conferencing has tripled since December 2001. IBM uses 3,000 virtual workplaces internally and another 3,000 to interact with their customers. IBM makes a hard benefit saving of $4.3m per month in reduced travel costs alone. The attraction of collaboration technologies is that they produce more effective processes, a more knowledgeable and cohesive workforce and save money. An irresistible combination in these cash-strapped times?

*Sybase - more than databases*

Sybase is no longer the database vendor that we all tend to think of it as. Of course, it still develops and markets a variety of database products. It even has a market leading product in its mobile database, SQL Anywhere. But it would be a mistake to think of Sybase today as a database company. The big difference is that Sybase no longer necessarily expects users of its other products to implement those in conjunction with its main database (Adaptive Server Enterprise) or, indeed, its application server product. It has taken the pragmatic decision that while it would like its customers to use these products, it will also support competitive database and application server products, if that's what clients prefer. In practice, Sybase categorises its products into nine categories - Databases, Data Warehousing, Resilience, Performance and Tuning, Application Development, Mobile solutions, Integration, Straight Through Processing (STP) and Presentation.

Sybase is now focused on is what it calls 'Information Liquidity' which means "the ability to transform data into economic value", which it presents via its Business Dashboard. Sybase essentially markets a variety of technologies that, taken together, provide the infrastructure to support business intelligence, corporate governance, performance management and so forth. The key enabling technologies for this infrastructure are the products that Sybase acquired when it bought New Era of Networks a couple of years ago. This company, you may recall, was intimately involved in the development of complementary facilities for MQSeries and WebSphere. There are two major products developed from the NEON technology: Integration Orchestrator and BizTracker. The former is, in essence, process-oriented middleware, while the latter is a Business Activity Monitoring tool. At the front-end is presentation which, in Sybase's terms, consists of both portal and dashboard products. In fact this part of the suite is interesting. When Sybase originally released its portal product a few years ago it wasn't much to write home about. However, it bought OnePage last year and incorporated that company's technology into its products. What OnePage brought to the party was that it could identify, extract and retrieve user-specific information from browser-accessible sources. The combination of OpenPage together with Sybase's own technology meant that the company had both an easy and comprehensive way to develop portlets. This has culminated today, in a portal product that is dynamic, interactive and supports real-time data views. Sybase has been re-positioning itself as an infrastructure supplier for some years but we, at least, have always tended to think of that as infrastructure with a database bias. That is no longer true: the company has moved up the infrastructure stack and its focus is now above the level of the database or application server.

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