Ian Thain

My last week has been hectic, to say the least... but hey that is just 'par for the course' of an Evangelist, especially an Enterprise Mobility one. Mobility in itself is an exciting place!

I left a cloudy London on Friday September 4th in the evening and arrived in a sunny Sydney on Sunday August 6th, very early in the morning. This was via an excellent Virgin Atlantic flight - VS200 from London to Sydney, via Hong Kong. As usual for Virgin Atlantic (which is my preferred airline) this was another comfortable flight with excellent service, over the 21 hours of flight time. Yes 21 hours, but at least I had 2 hours to see the inside of Hong Kong airport.

The reason behind this week would be to represent Sybase Enterprise Mobility in my first visit Down-Under, showing amongst other things.... Sybase's support for iPhone in the Enterprise. During the time, my colleagues in Sybase Australia kept me busy with 11 customer & partner visits and 6 press interviews.

You can read some of the interviews soon. Outside of that all my duties were related to Wireless World 2009, which was held at the Sydney Convention Center.

During the Conference I presented one of the Keynotes on Wednesday - the opening day, to an attentive 250+ strong audience and another session on Thursday.

In my Keynote address I explained and evangelized about...

• Having a Mobility Strategy that can evolve
• A next generation mobility platform for application development, supporting heterogeneous device and data sources. One that also includes security and manageability.
• The importance of having security & manageability for mobile devices (this coincided with the very important Verizon/Sybase announcement this week)
• The Risks involved with Mobile Enterprise
• The Benefits of Mobile Enterprise
• The Opportunities for Mobile Enterprise
• The advancements into the Mobile Enterprise

My second session was a more technical development presentation, based upon thoughts & experience of Business Mobile Development. During this session I covered areas of...

• Thin Client vs. Thick Client or what I like to call Smart Client Mobile Applications
• What Does Business Mobile Development usually involve?
• GUI Design, Performance, Data Synchronization
• The Next Generation Mobile Application Platform - MEAP (Mobile Enterprise Application Platform)

The Sybase stand in the Exhibition hall had a great deal of traffic into it. These were interesting folks with great stories & requirements and all very interested in the Sybase Unwired Platform, which is Sybase's MEAP. Initially I got the feeling that the Australian IT folks though they may be behind the wave of mobility, compared with other geographic areas. I am happy to report that they are not... in fact they are really riding high on the Mobility Wave, not surprising for a Surfing nation. Why? I think these guys are very eager to try new technology, pushing the boundaries of their Enterprises into Mobility. This could be due to a few reasons, firstly their economy seems not to have been hit has hard as other areas of the world. Secondly I think the Aussie spirit of continuing to be the explor and their get up and go mentality.... no worries mate!

Friday took my visit continuing to Melbourne, after a very early Virgin Blue flight. This day continued my customer & partner visits and followed just as well as Sydney.

I would like to take this time to thank... Craig Macfarlane & the staff at Association & Communications Events http://www.acevents.com.au, Sybase Australia (Sydney & Melbourne Office) and the attendees of Wireless World 2009.

Good-bye Wireless World & good-bye Sydney! I am going to sleep on the flight back home to London.

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