CTIA:Sybase launches mobile enterprise tools

SAN FRANCISCO—At this week’s CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment event, Sybase announced a new middleware platform featuring natural language recognition, and a new non-transcoding Internet content solution, both tools that can help carriers provide more efficient mobile enterprise services.

The Answers Anywhere platform, launched by the company’s iAnywhere Solutions subsidiary, is built on the interactive voice recognition technology Sybase picked up through its recent acquisition of Dejima. It use natural language and context recognition capabilities.

“We have taken advantage of the technology and optimized it,” said Antoine Blondeau, senior director of business development at Sybase’s iAnywhere unit. “It can be used for any type of device.”

He said the solution allows different types of enterprise users with different kinds of devices to access the same services, such as messaging, through the same speech interface. Answers Anywhere recognizes any language, and is multi-modal in input and output, meaning that a user can make a voice request, but receive a reply via a text message, Blondeau said.

Sybase also announced the mFolio personalized web content solution for mobile devices used by enterprise professionals, such as the BlackBerry. The offering allows small screen web browsing without labor-intensive content transcoding, so that Internet content doesn’t have to be made mobile-ready. Intel executive Sean Maloney demonstrated mFolio during his keynote presentation at the show.