''Developers need environment that allows creativity to flourish''

Sybase, once a strong competitor to Oracle for its database offerings, carved a path for itself in the enterprise and mobile infrastructure development and integration software solutions.

Aparna Lal caught up with Dr Raj Nathan, Sr Vice president, Information Technology Solutions Group, on the sidelines of Sybase's annual technical training conference TechWave 2006. Excerpts from the exclusive interview:

Can you tell us about the innovations pioneered by Sybase? 

Historically, we have always been ahead of others in introducing new products as well as new features in our existing product lines. Sybase's calling card to a very large extent has been technology. We have to our credit pioneering technologies like the client-server architecture; the data window component; the OLTP databases; customization of mobile database, all this is at a very high level. Over the last three years we introduced caller level encryption in Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15; the way we have used the synchronization between a mobile device and a datacenter is also a first of its kind.

What drives innovation at Sybase? 

According to me, innovation can be continuous and discontinuous. While continuous innovation is need-based innovation where our customer asks for some feature, our team innovates and deliver; the discontinuous innovation are things for which we envision a need. Being in the industry for so long, we feel that if some things line up in a particular way there will be an industry need, a market for a particular type of solution.

However, if we go to our customers with such ideas at that stage they may just not understand its use for eg. Linux, we were the first company to port an enterprise class database to Linux, which at that point in time did not make sense for many of our customers. In such cases, we do our research and spend extra resources and come out with products that will cater to the future demands.

In the process of picking up ideas many get rejected, because they are not just good ideas. The interesting fact is that many a times some good ideas also get rejected, as they just cannot be invested in. Because there are finite amount of resources and you can do only so many things. For all of us on a relative basis, we have more things on the plate than we have resources for. So all good ideas in which we do not invest are kept aside and are considered when the time is apt for it. We have this process of continuous thinking and brain storming among the team.

What according to you is the interdependence between software and hardware innovation? 

Software and hardware innovation in some cases can march independently; in some other cases they have to be inter-twined; they need to be in sync. As you move higher up in the software stack you move away from the hardware; the closer you are to the hardware stack the more the interdependence. For eg operating systems and compilers are more dependant on the chipset but say a SAP application, it just needs to know the database architecture and is not much concerned about the chipset and hence is less hardware dependant.

When we visualize a product, we keep in mind the hardware trends, to take full advantage of the hardware innovation. For eg. If you are building a car, you need to know the kinds of road they will be driven on, it will be rather foolish to design something without knowing the platform it will run on. We need to be aware of all hardware trends and innovation to leverage its full benefit.

India is known for its vast talent pool, however not many world standard products have been developed by Indian companies. Why do you think is there a gap there? Where are we missing out?

In India emphasis for a long time has been on application programming and application level product development. The focus on system level programming and system software is not too much. According to me, the change needs to happen at the college level; engineers need to be trained more on concepts and algorithms rather than on usage of packages.

Like when people learn about databases they will probably be taught how to use a Sybase or an Oracle database, instead they need to be trained on theory of databases to make them understand the implications of different algorithms and how they can be used while programming. There is no dearth of talent in India, our Pune development center employs engineers from IIT and we will be getting 3-4 patents out of them, so definitely talent is there what lacks is proper training.

Another important component is that there should be an environment that allows creativity to flourish. The management should enable that by allowing people freedom to disagree, to put across their point, which I think is a concern with many managers today. In Sybase, we allow people that kind of freedom and that's what leads to innovation.

What are Sybase's future plans?

We are thinking about the future, we are watching and following some trends. We have dedicated resources to experiment with new products, all that is happening. However, currently our focus is on developing the existing markets.