Sybase is no stranger to tough economic periods. Before 2001, Sybase was a database company loosing more than a $100 million a year on revenues that peaked at $700 million. Other problems included high employee turnover and doom and gloom comments from Wall Street analysts and computer industry analysts. Today, Sybase has revenues of more than $1.1 billion, backed by solid profitability and double-digit growth in key market segments. Sybase also has emerged as leader in embedded software for analytical applications and for mobile devices. Sybase might be on the road toward meeting its $2 billion revenue mark, but a key part of the corporate strategy calls for controlling costs and finding ways for the company to improve business processes. Jim Swartz, Sybase's CIO and vice president, says, "Our mantra is to simplify, to standardize, and to consolidate."

Enterpriseleadership.org recently sat down with Swartz to talk about the initiatives his organization has put in place to deal with this economic downturn. Here he is what he had to say:

EL. Has the economy effected Sybase in any way?

JS. The issues aren't so much cost-cutting or tightening our belt. We are working to make the company more effective and efficient with the resources we have. Let me provide some example these initiatives.  Certainly, we travel less than we used to do. As a means to help us to be more effective, we have added videoconferencing into our mix of toolsets. It allows us to work from almost any place at any time. As a result, we can create the 7 by 24, 365 global manager to support the company. This technology has proved to be very effective. Even if we weren't in a down economy, this initiative would help us to be more effective and efficient to support the company with a global workforce. The net effect of cutting travel and introducing videoconferencing has made our people more productive, especially with respect to communicating across our many locations. It has also impacted the way managers work. For example, we allow our managers to work at home so they can have communications at more convenient times with people in other locations.

EL. Whose technology are you for videoconferencing?

JS. We use a mix in the sense that Cisco provides the backbone technology and the desktop conferencing technology, but in our conference rooms we use Polycom's technologies.

EL. Are you using 3D telepresence for videoconferencing?

JS. No. We use a high-definition system. As we all know, videoconferencing technology has been around for more than 30 years. Every few years it goes through a new generation, which supposedly creates promise. Now the technology is at the point where it is very effective. We don't get the old Max Headroom-type displays of people at the other end, as well as broken voices. From a cultural point of view, we need to figure out the most effective way to use this technology. How do you really have a videoconference between two engineers? How do you have a videoconference where one person is broadcasting to multiple sites? How do you have an effective videoconference between two videoconferencing rooms, as well as to show the content materials to people at the other end. These materials might include training sessions.

EL. Who is doing the training to improve the use of videoconferencing?

JS. Right now, IT does the training to help people make better use of videoconferencing. We are coming up on the curve. We have discovered some interesting aspects of videoconferencing that we didn't expect. For example, just the location of the camera in the room with respect to lighting can make a big difference in the image quality. If the camera has a long view on the people sitting at the conference table, they appear as if they are sitting at the end of a tunnel. You want that camera to zoom in so you get the value of seeing each person up close and personal. The goal is to try to emulate a telepresence capability.

EL. What have been your cost savings since you want to videoconferencing?

JS. We are looking to save between $2 million to $3 million a year.

EL. What other things have you done to take cost out of the business?

JS. Certainly, on the data center side of things, we have done much with virtualization. Say you had one server per application before virtualization. Now you might be able to create a virtual machine on a single server or up to as many as 10 to 15 virtual machines on that server. You can save a significant amount of CPU purchases.

EL. How many servers have you virtualized and whose hypervisor do you use?

JS. Because we provide software for almost all devices, we have hypervisors from each of the major vendors. We manage both enterprise applications and engineering applications. On the enterprise side, we have virtualized more than 50 percent of our enterprise applications. On the engineering side, we have virtualized many of the development environments for the engineers. The unanticipated consequence of that virtualization is that they created more virtual machines that we expected they would. We don't have to wait six months for the whole procurement cycle to circle around so we can bring in machines. We can provision a new virtual machine in just a few hours, especially if we give the engineers the ability to establish those virtual machines.

EL. Have you moved to Web 2.0 or any kind of cloud computing?

JS. Certainly, we have Web 2.0 applications, and we are looking at cloud computing as a future. We are working towards first creating our own internal cloud. As more and more vendors provide cloud computing, we will move our cloud outside of the company to create a virtual data center.

We have operated on the idea on simplifying, standardizing, and consolidating our data centers. In prior years, we had up to 30 data centers. We now have three data centers, including a disaster recovery facility. With virtualization and cloud computing, we are seeing that there potentially will be an impact on the way we do disaster recovery. It will also give us the ability to create, what we call virtual data centers, where people will look at ones we have left and see it as one data center.

EL. How much money have you saved through virtualization?

JS. Through virtualization, we have driven down about $3 million a year. What is important in 2006, we looked at our data center in Dublin, California, and recognized that we would run out of power and cooling in this data center by 2009 unless we did something. Our action was to virtualize, to retire old servers, and to use the technology that writes the images of some servers to a backup storage device, which allows us to bring the images back near term. Because of those efforts, we have extended the life of that data center out to 2017. We have cut the cooling costs as well. We have virtualized not only processors, but storage as well.

EL. Have you replaced any of the uninterruptible power supplies?

JS. We have replaced some of them with more energy-conserving devices.

EL. Are you using any hydroelectric or nuclear power?

JS. Being in California, we probably draw on some nuclear power, but we aren't tied directly into nuclear power. Our efforts have mostly been on the conversation side internally, rather than on the supply side.

EL. Have you had any staff reductions in IT?

JS. We have reduced staff a bit, but it has been a result of requiring new skillsets from our folks. We have been realigning what we do as we move from older technologies to mobilizing much of our workforce. As a result, we have changed the way we operate, transforming, not only IT, but helping to transform the business as well.

EL. How are you keeping up the morale in IT giving the economic downturn?

JS. Keeping up morale up has always been an important aspect of what we do. Because we have embarked on a number of very exciting forward-thinking projects, we have engaged our staff in what these projects will mean to the company. These projects include the virtualization of the data center, the virtualization of the desktop, and the business intelligence types of projects on the application side, and the development of new applications that help the business to grow.

Our role within IT is to improve the performance of the business as a whole. We have a stated objective within the company to grow to $2 billion over the next several years. Even in this economy downturn, we are still pursuing this objective. The projects we have in play focus on doing that. For example, to make our sales force more effective, we are giving them better information to use for forecasting, and providing a greater ability for them to work with our partners. We are also improving our partners' abilities to work within the company. Our partners also include our business partners, such as our finance people.

We went to make our managers more effective and more efficient with the use of new technologies, especially when they are out of the office. Better mobile technologies, which we develop inside of IT, will enable them to respond in real time. Many of the things I am talking about deploy the application of our own Sybase technologies, especially for mobile email, and mobile applications. Our analytics tools will help our sales and marketing teams understand what our customers' needs are.

El. Of all of these initiatives, which ones will have the greatest business impact?

JS. In terms of business impact of helping the company grow, we have two key ones. The analytical marts help us to understand our forecasting. They work together with products Salesforce.com and some of our marketing tools. As a result, we can better project sales estimates, such as much business is going to come in for a particular quarter. Activities that use our analytics tools are very important. Building on our own tools, we have created portals which give our partners better access to information they need to be more effective sales folks. Much of our growth will come from our partner establishments as well.

El. What are you trying to improve upon within IT?

JS.  We are trying to improve upon partnering with the business folks. All of these projects to a large extent are transformational. IT is changing the way it does business, but IT is also helping the business change the way it operates to be more responsive to our customers and our partners to help grow the company.

EL. How do you work with the CFO?

JS. I report to the marketing organization. We used to be part of the financial organization. Because we are an outreach organization dealing with our customer community, we have seen that relationship change over time. The finance organization is a partner of ours. We work very closely with them, especially on developing systems that help report our financials more effectively, that manage our order entry systems more effectively, and that help develop strong relationships in understanding our financial numbers. In addition to finance, other important partners include human resources, legal, and marketing and sales. Our people are becoming more and more business oriented as much as they are technically oriented. We are seeing a major shift where many of our information engines are becoming software as a service engines. They bring the data back inside, and analyze it with our analytics tools. This process brings our people to a different position in the organization. They become very much oriented towards exploiting the business opportunities of IT, rather than just the technology opportunities.

Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a free-lance writer and IT consultant from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.