Sybase Repowered

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September 22, 1997

Sybase Repowered

CEO says three profitable quarters and a new tools lineup put the vendor back on track
itchell Kertzman became president and CEO of Sybase Inc. 15 months ago, just days after the company announced it would lose $24.6 million in the second quarter of 1996, and several months after Sybase acquired tools vendor Powersoft, which Kertzman helped found in 1972. In addition to the company's mounting financial woes, Kertzman faced a developer community confused by the company's disjointed tools lineup.
Today, Kertzman's Sybase looks like a very different company, with three consecutive profitable quarters, revenue holding at 1996 levels, and a new tools lineup. InformationWeek editors sat down with Kertzman, recen tly appointed Sybase's chairman of the board, to discuss the present and future state of the company and its technologies.
Photo of Mitchell Kertzman IW: Is it fair to characterize what happened two years ago as the Powersoft acquisition of Sybase?
KERTZMAN: No, I don't think so. It's an easy [characterization] to make, because I'm the CEO, but if you look at the senior management of the company, it's a mix of Powersoft and Sybase content. Today, Sybase feels different from Powersoft, and it feels different from [the old] Sybase. It's finally gotten to be not only something new, but something better than either was. After two very difficult years, we've finally gotten to one plus one being greater than two.
IW: After Bill Gates made his surprise appearance during your keynote address, endorsing Powersoft products and t echnologies, the previously reserved audience was buzzing. Nobody booed, but there was a palpable tension in the air, reminiscent of Bill's recent surprise appearance at MacWorld. What's going on here? Why is Gates publicly endorsing technologies that rival Microsoft's?
KERTZMAN: Microsoft is a very interesting company. First of all, we never had a problem getting access to technology from Microsoft. So they have organizationally and culturally set up something where they can be very open with their APIs and technologies to us. And yet, I know they have people whose compensation depended on taking market share away from PowerBuilder. They can do those things at the same time. So the fact that Bill can be on our video, promoting us, and yet they can have people who are trying to take food off our children's plates, is completely consistent with the Microsoft culture.
IW: Component servers are a new technology category. Really, there a re only two products out there right now: Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), and Sybase's Jaguar CTS (component transaction server). How does IT evaluate these things? What should they look for in a component server?
KERTZMAN: We call it a "component transaction server," but it's more generically a component server-transactions are a subset of the things it does. And since it's a new category, we haven't seen checklists in InformationWeek and other trade publications, with respect to what to look for in a component server. The difference between Jaguar and MTS is the difference between the proprietary architecture of MTS, meaning that it is there to support only Microsoft protocols and Microsoft platforms-ActiveX and DCOM, basically-vs. the more open approach of Jaguar, which not only runs on a variety of operating system and hardware platforms, but also supports all the major object and component models.
I see the target that MTS is aimed at as the more traditional TP-monitor-transaction services, whereas our vision of Jaguar is broader than that. Our vision of Jaguar is to provide componentized services of all kinds. For example, we are looking at componentizing some of our gateways, middleware, and connectivity and replication software, so that the architectures would look like component services in Jaguar, as opposed to something discrete.
IW: How broad is that effort? Are you looking at componentizing the entire product line, and making as much of that available as business services as possible? A wholesale restructuring, in a sense?
KERTZMAN: Right. All the way to servers. In some cases, you rewrite a product from the ground up, and in some cases, you put wrappers around existing products, so that they can be treated as components, and so that people have universal and consistent APIs and architectures. This is the way we think about the scope of what Jaguar really means. These are steps along the way of turning application network architectures into something that looks more like today's internetworking architectures. In other words, Jaguar will look more like a switch or a router, rather than a layer of an application architecture.
IW: When you brought PowerBuilder 1.0 to market, it was a unique product, and it defined a new category. As you move into the Java space with PowerJ, and some of your other Java technologies, this is an area where these tools are, at some level, commodities. What is the differentiation? Why should IT consider your Java technologies, as opposed to Asymetrix's, or Sun's, or Symantec's, and the dozens of others out there?
KERTZMAN: You mentioned Asymetrix. People used to ask us, "What's the difference between PowerBuilder and Toolbook?" That's how big the market space was back then. From Powersoft's point of view, it was a pr etty crowded market [when PowerBuilder 1.0 was introduced]. We separated ourselves, largely because we understood enterprise developers.
And that's the same primary advantage we have in the Java space. Yes, Java functionality is commodity-like. But it is the ability to put that language, and Java components, and the interfaces with the rest of the enterprise world, into the context of the enterprise developer.
IW: Sybase took some heat a few years ago for not having an object database strategy. Then object databases flopped. Any comments on the state of the object database?
KERTZMAN: We've seen phenomena like this before. It's usually something that excites academia-artificial intelligence, expert systems, objects, object relational-and never transitions to the commercial market. Developing stuff that the market isn't asking for is always a little bit dangerous.
I don't believe customers want to extend the database themselves. They don't want to write databases. There is genuinely the need for some specialized object-like data types. But there are not 300 of those, there's five or six of them.
IW: What's Sybase's message today to Oracle and Visual Basic developers?
KERTZMAN: Our message to Oracle developers is-especially with Oracle's decision not to continue with Sedona-the Powersoft toolset, PowerStudio, is the best environment for developing and deploying component-oriented applications for Oracle8. We would certainly love to work with more of the Oracle database community to develop Oracle-based applications.
In terms of the Visual Basic community, the question here is, do you see your job as developing Microsoft applications, or do you see your job as devel oping enterprise applications? There's a difference there. Microsoft's tools strategy is to promote the growth of its platform. Sybase's tool strategy is to help people build great enterprise applications using components-multiplatform, multiobject model. Is it your goal to make Bill richer, or is it your goal to build great applications?

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