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CHEN: At the present time we are still hiring selectively, and there’s no reason to start laying people off.

John Chen, president and CEO of enterprise mobility specialist Sybase recently completed his first visit to the region. Imthishan Giado met with him to discuss the future of enterprise software.

What is the purpose of your visit to the region?

To see customers. This is my first trip to the Middle East. Therefore by definition, it's my first trip to Dubai. We've been doing business for a long, long time. We have seen some very strong growth in the last three years - we've been growing 28% on a compounded basis and have a lot of customers here in this region. I've been very fortunate to visit and talk a little bit about the company and our strategy and direction and meet our customers.

We have about 80% of the Islamic banking market, so it's a very dominant market share. We have ten internet banking customers in the Gulf region, which makes us number one in the region. The company overall is very oriented to the financial as well as the telecoms verticals. That's the similar profile everywhere around the world and we operate in 38 different countries.

Are there specific verticals which you target with your products?

We have a lot of different verticals but the biggest two that represent 40% of our business is 20% from telecom and 20% from financials. The financials are banks, brokerage houses, and insurance companies, investment banking companies. Outside of that, in more of an IT-developed economy like the United States for example, we do quite a bit of healthcare, quite a bit with the technology companies and we do quite a bit with governments,
of course.

Has your position in the market for software and services been affected by the recession?

We've had two record years, six record quarters in a row, both in revenue and profit and cash flow. We're growing the company organically last year at 11%. The economic slowdown - especially given that we have such a big financial sector exposure - has not affected us negatively yet.

Do you see a dip in revenue for your particular market segment coming this year?

It depends on how long this recession is going to last. Let me explain why we haven't seen it and then I'll answer that question. We haven't seen it because of our two major product lines that are selling very well today. One is in the analytics world. What we do is provide a risk analytics platform for banks and financial institutions to provide dashboard on how much risk they're taking, anywhere from just a trading risk, or a credit risk.

The other one is mobile - mobile banking, mobile commerce, mobile messaging, we're literally the number one in market share around the world. Not a very big market, it's about $400 million for us last year. It's big enough but not a huge multibillion dollar market. It's growth rates are very high, like 29%.

A lot of the mobile computing makes its way to the enterprises, whether it's banking, or payments, or just pure mobile extension of applications. Even in the downfall, these are very much needed technologies. If the economy on a worldwide basis persistently goes bad, especially if it lasts beyond this first half of the year and goes deep into the second half, there are a few things that will affect us.

Number one, at a certain point in time, the capital spending, even if they need it, is going to have a practical value of whether they can actually get the money. Number two is the currency; we do 50% of our business outside the United States and 30% of that is in Europe. These are very heavily hit areas in terms of currency.

Not withstanding that, we think that our mobile infrastructure software will continue to be bought, that the analytics software will continue to be popular, the internet banking system will continue to do well.

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