We helped a company, C.H. Robinson, that supplies produce to large supermarkets. It wanted to RFID-tag all of their goods to reduce spoilage and move it more efficiently. They selected Sybase for the tag readers and the middleware so they could make real-time decisions.

Are there any consumer trends foreshadowing enterprise wireless applications? People talk about location-specific applications, like a service on our cell phone that helps us find a nearby restaurant. I think you'll see businesses try to leverage that model. The other one is natural language interfaces, where you can just talk to your phone and ask for what you want. Putting both together, you can imagine a salesperson wanting updated sales info from [a] client location they are at. Rather than scrolling through 25 screens on their device, they could say, "Please give me the latest information for all my accounts in Dublin, Calif." And it will parse that out into database queries and deliver it to you on the device.

A lot of times, I get asked whether there is going to be a killer app for wireless that will make the market inflect. We are seeing very steady 20 percent + growth, which I think is going to continue. There will be some small companies that will figure out how to use wireless to leapfrog their competitors, like the way Amazon.com and eBay learned to use the Web better. We just hope they're using Sybase when they do it.

What is the state of Sybase's original core business -- databases? We launched ASE 15 last year. We can now encrypt all of the data inside ASE. Our competitors like Oracle encrypt data on the outside. But as it sits in an Oracle database? Not encrypted.

Our [ASE] users are investment banks, huge trading houses, the NSA, the CIA, so we spend a lot of time on security. Security was one reason we announced 640 new ASE customers in 2005. Forty percent of those wins were in China, where we are No. 2. We're not competing with any legacy brand perceptions there. It's a flat-out bake-off, and Sybase is winning more than its share there. In the U.S. or Europe, where it's a battle to get somebody to swap out, it's much much harder. Ingres will run into this, because people just do not rip out databases.