Remember the excitement you felt when you first learned to develop applications with PowerBuilder? Instead of taking three weeks to build a window like your C counterparts, you were painting windows in less than three minutes - and you were able to code functionality to connect those windows to your enterprise database! You delighted management by delivering projects in record time, you dazzled users with nifty graphics and easy to navigate applications, and you could even implement end users' change requests with lightning speed.

A long time has passed since those days, and the application development landscape has changed a great deal. Today's developers are faced with demands by management to use specific technologies, new application architectures, and still deliver a timely product. XML, XSLT, AJAX, J2EE, HTML, WSDL, JSF, DTD, SOAP, CSS, and XML are some of the alphabet soup of new technologies developers have had to digest over the last few years just to remain marketable.

On top of the ever increasing workload to keep up with new and emerging technologies, developers have had to face the additional challenge of more demanding end users. In addition to wanting Web access to many applications and quick delivery of bug fixes, a new breed of users has emerged - the Road Warriors. These are end users who are away from their office, either on the road or elsewhere on campus, who want specific data delivered to them on their PDAs or SmartPhones. They want it quickly, they want it to be always up-to-date, and they want it available wherever they are, whenever they need it, even if they're not connected.

These road warriors demand specific data to make them more efficient and more productive when they're away from their desk. Sometimes they simply need an extension of a desktop application for a mobile device. Other times they may require a completely different way of accessing and presenting data. And, in some businesses, these new requirements may be moving targets, changing all the time. A sales team may need to track special promotions that change every quarter, a retail chain may track different hot items each season, and field service personnel may need to have always-available data to properly service customers on calls.

Recent industry data trends for mobile development indicate that 66% (Deloitte Research, IDC 2005) of all businesses are now building mobile applications, and by 2008 that number will increase to 75% (IDC, Forrester, 2005). The majority of mobile development, around 66%, is being done by small and medium-sized businesses (IDC, Forrester, 2005). What's unique about all of this is that the demand for these new applications is being driven by line-of-business users and managers, groups who don't have significant budgets allocated for application development.

LOB managers are facing increasing demands to reduce costs and increase productivity and, at the same time, facilitate the flow of data from the field back to the enterprise data center, and back out to the field. This is already evident in a wide variety of industries, and the problem is exacerbated as the number of road warriors, or people who spend at least some part of the work day away from the office, continues to increase. It's reaching a critical point, however, in industries where field services technicians, such as utilities and telecommunications workers, spend a large part of their day recording data in the field and then requiring manual data entry to be performed back at the main office, often with a delay of a day or more.

In an economy where businesses are being asked to do more with less, this entirely new breed of mobile application is disrupting the workload of IT departments everywhere. But, to remain competitive and solve business needs quickly, someone needs to build these applications.

As a PowerBuilder developer, you are perfectly positioned to save the day, again. Without incurring any learning curve, you can deliver enterprise data to your organization's mobile users, meet their ever-changing demands of LOB management almost immediately, and deliver robust mobile applications that will once again dazzle your end users and delight your management.

How? With PocketBuilder.

PowerBuilder is the foundation of PocketBuilder, so it's built on proven technology that has stood the test of time. It's rock solid and it's optimized for mobile development so you can build applications that are occasionally connected, yet always available. Leverage your PowerBuilder investments in both code and product skillset to deliver time-sensitive data and information to mobile users throughout your organization, on demand.

What's in the Box?
There are three things that make PocketBuilder unique. First, it's the only mobile development tool on the market today that is truly RAD and easy to use. The familiar look and feel of the IDE makes it simple for experienced PowerBuilder developers to use immediately out of the box and become mobile developers. And, its rich UI and 4GL power enable new users to be successful quickly, too. Second, it includes MobiLink data synchronization from iAnywhere, the mobile market leader. The most complex part of building any mobile application is ensuring the data is always up to date, both on the back end and on mobile devices. PocketBuilder simplifies this complex process. And third, DataWindow technology saves developers time from having to code tedious SQL, complex data validation and presentation code.

On top of all that, PocketBuilder is replete with hundreds of built-in functions and has native support for printers, cameras, barcode scanners, and Bluetooth devices. Developers can test deployment on the desktop, with an emulator, or directly on devices. It supports a variety of PocketPC-based SmartPhone and PDA devices and was the first product to natively deliver biometric support, adding another level of security to your applications. Other features include support for SMS, a Multiple Orientation Painter (MOP) to develop for both portrait and landscape screen orientations, and native RFID support. PocketBuilder runs on the Windows Mobile 5 platform and supports raw Win CE/ CE .NET. It leverages the .NET Framework extensively under the covers, providing rich functionality to developers building PocketBuilder applications.

Award-Winning Development
In its 1.0 release in 2004, PocketBuilder received a Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Award. Jolt awards are given to products, books, and Web sites that have "jolted" the industry by helping to create faster, easier, and more efficient software. PocketBuilder has also won two Mobile Village awards, one in 2004 and in 2005. The Mobile Village awards are chosen by e-mail subscribers of Mobile Village's free twice-monthly mobile/wireless technology newsletter, Go Mobile. PocketBuilder has therefore received accolades from both industry experts as well as the developers themselves who use mobile tools.

Even Sybase customers who use PocketBuilder are getting in on some award-winning action. Ochsner Clinic Foundation was a finalist in the RealWare Awards for using PocketBuilder to extend their cardiovascular information system built with PowerBuilder. Ochsner was able to achieve HIPPA compliance ahead of schedule as well as dramatically increase the number of medical referrals processed for their patients due to service-level improvements. Massive amounts of data, which was needed to be processed using complex decision metrics that are applied through various algorithms, had backed up. By placing PDAs in the hands of clinicians at the point of contact with patients, the data backlog was removed, providing better service to more patients and a huge cost savings of several hundred thousand dollars to Ochsner.

Mobilize Your Career as Well as Your Users
Everyone is talking about solving problems by "thinking outside the box." Deliver on this overused directive by creating applications for a new set of users and a new set of challenges, today. Solve problems that have not been budgeted for and meet real business demands easily and quickly. While you're at it, get on the fast track to mobilizing your career with PocketBuilder.