Tool and application server maker Sybase Inc. has extended the reach of its products in Canada through an agreement with a software distributor.
Lifeboat Distribution of Shrewsbury, N.J., which has a reseller arm based in Mississauga, Ont., has agreed to carry the entire line of Sybase application
development tools, the companies have announced.
Until now Lifeboat only carried Sybase’s PowerDesigner enterprise modeling tool and EAServer application server. Added to its lineup are Sybase’s PowerBuilder rapid application development tools.
“”We’re very excited about it,”” said Steve McNamara, vice-president and general manager of Lifeboat Distribution Canada.
“”We’ve had several requests”” for the other Sybase applications, he said.
Lifeboat has “”hundreds”” of resellers in this country, McNamara said. In addition, it reaches end users through its direct selling arm, Programmer’s Paradise, which has been carrying the entire Sybase line for some time.
He doubted the addition of the new products to Lifeboat will take away direct sales.
The announcements deepen Sybase’s committments to the developer community, said John Strano, the company’s technical evangelist.
At the same time, Sybase announced the release of new versions of some of its applications.
PowerDesigner 10.0 now supports the latest versions of relational databases from Oracle and IBM, an interface to SIMUL8’s simulation tool and includes Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) round-trip engineering support.
It also supports Model Driven Architecture (MDA) across the entire tool. Sybase says this means data modelers and business process modelers can customize MDA to meet their specific methodologies.
Prices start at US$995.
Pocket PowerBuilder 1.5, a mobile and wireless application tool for Pocket PC applications, now includes native support for fingerprint recognition technology. Strano said the new version will help companies extend their existing application logic to the mobile enterprise.
EAServer 5.0 offers easier install and configuration with the use of wizards, Sybase said, as well as fully configurable caching and load-balancing options.
Prices start at US$3,000.
Meanwhile, iAnywhere Solutions, a Sybase subsidiary, announced the availability of the free M-Business Anywhere Developer Edition, which allows developers to deliver Web-based content and applications to PDAs with minimal recoding.
The company also unveiled new integration between M-Business Anywhere and SQL Anywhere Studio UltraLite technology, enabling developers to leverage the mobile database to create Web-based mobile applications. Enterprises will be able to create mobile applications with all the benefits of a relational database on the device and the development and deployment advantages of a Web-based architecture, the company said.
