Sybase 365 Marty Beard bullish on the mobility market, but not mobile advertising
When I think of Sybase, I naturally imagine large databases and perhaps analytics software, but not as a mobile messaging operator!
But as I learned last night, I was dead wrong: Sybase, through its mobile subsidiary Sybase 365 is the world’s largest inter-operator mobile messaging company.
This year, Sybase 365 expects to reach $200 million in revenues (up 14% from last year) or about 1/5 of the company overall revenues.
“We connect virtually all the 900+ mobile operators in the world and reach over 4 billion mobile phone users [out of 7 billion worldwide],” explains to me Sybase 365 President Marty Beard, speaking yesterday at TiE’s first entrepreneur week in Santa Clara, Calif.
For Beard, the closest competitors are Syniverse – which recently acquired Verisign’s mobile messaging business for $175 million in cash – and Ericsson IPX solution.
Mobile advertising has not lived up to its promise
By being at the centre of the world’s SMS and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) traffic, Sybase 365 can spot early trends in mobile commerce around the globe including hot areas like mobile CRM, mobile banking and mobile money transfer. Surprisingly, mobile advertising is not one of them.
“Most of the mobile advertising business has been around messaging, sending SMS or MMS to consumers and not banners or even ads inside these messages. Pure advertising on mobility has just not lived up to its billing at this point,” adds Beard.
Sybase saw traffic surge after Apple enabled MMS on iPhone
Another new trend in the mobility market is the uptake of videos transferred on mobile networks using MMS. This is especially true since Apple added the MMS feature to its latest iPhone 3GS device. ”When Apple enabled MMS, the traffic spiked 600% and video is a huge part of that,” said Beard.
Follows are excerpts of our video interview with Beard at the TiE event. First on Sybase 365′s business:
And then on mobile advertising:
Posted by TechPulse 360 
