Sybase today will give a preview of its mobile business initiatives at its TechWave conference in Las Vegas. The company is expected to announce a global partnership with smartphone maker HTC as well as give its partners a look at the future of its iAnywhere and Sybase 365 platforms.Sybase showcase its "Unwired Enterprise" initiative, with plans for product shipments in 2008 and 2009:

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"The key benefit is going to be improved interoperability between all these mobile devices," said Rob Veitch, senior director of business development at Sybase. "We want to be proactive about this, share road maps and work together on things we know to be issues."

Sybase will discuss data services that provide a uniform way to access heterogeneous data sources, ranging from structured and unstructured data to pre-packaged applications.

Also up for discussion are mobile middleware services that act as a bridge between enterprise data and mobile devices in development and deployment environments.

While the future of the mobile enterprise market remains uncertain, Sybase is a trailblazer, offering new types of applications, including integration of mobile with new IT trends like virtualization.

Of course, the question remains: Will business mobility ever make it past push e-mail? And if it does, will it be the vendors, like Sybase, that win this market? Or will it go to the systems integrators and their carrier partners?

Daniel Taylor, formerly of the Mobile Enterprise Alliance, in an interview with Over The Air warned that the market for business mobility would never explode until the vendors and the carriers agreed on open standards.

Even without open standards, devices like the RIM BlackBerry continue to sell and smartphones are the device dujour .

What do you think? Will companies like Sybase pave the future for business mobility? Or will these vendors get squeezed out by integrators and the carriers?