Informix Software, the database company, has announced a development, licensing and marketing agreement with San Francisco-based Gravitate, Inc, a supplier of enabling technologies and applications for location precise wireless services.
To ensure this agreement is appropriately reflected and fulfilled locally, Informix South Africa is looking for partners with the right skills levels to take the combined offerings to market.
The partnership will see Informix`s and Gravitate`s separate technologies integrated into a new database management solution centred on the spatially enabled Informix Dynamic Server. The combined solution will solve the complex problem of managing moving point data and give customers the ability to manage geospatial information on wireless mobile users referenced by latitude-longitude coordinates.
Informix Dynamic Server allows organisations intelligently to manage complex geospatial information alongside traditional data, without sacrificing the efficiency of the relational database model. The extensible and scalable features of Informix Dynamic Server will enable the Gravitate Platform to handle the rigorous management and processing demands associated with moving point data.
The Gravitate Platform is designed around a core, patent-pending technology, CLoUDS (Client Locating and User Discovery System), which solves the complex problem associated with managing moving point data in spatial databases.
With CLoUDS, Gravitate enables applications to use the location information of single mobile users and/or mobile user groups. This capability opens the door to new breeds of mobile-to-mobile applications, such as professional networking, matchmaking or mobile-to-mobile gaming.
"The partnership between the companies has been a logical one," says Informix SA country manager Simon Jeggo. "It allows the two companies to provide a far greater depth of solution to certain vertical markets than would be possible on their own. The combined technologies are particularly valid in this market. They will allow law enforcement agencies such as police and justice to know at any time where people are, using any mobile device. As such they could help track criminals, monitor suspects out on bail, or be used for precise locations of emergency calls.
"In line with our channel model, we will not be offering the combined platform ourselves, but will rather appoint suitably skilled partners to develop and deploy solutions."
The Gravitate Platform supports the rapid development and delivery of advanced location-based wireless Internet services to users of mobile devices, including new classes of services such as "mobile-user-to-mobile-user" and "static-location-to-mobile-user" applications.
The company is offering the Gravitate Platform to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and infrastructure providers, carriers and network operators, and application service providers (ASP) or content providers. Gravitate has released its Alpha product, and expects to deliver a commercial version by the third quarter of 2001.
"While traditional static-to-mobile services are unlikely to drive significant revenues from wireless location-based applications, it is clear that emerging mobile-to-mobile services will create new opportunities for providers of these applications," says Eugene Signorini, analyst, Wireless Mobile Services for The Yankee Group. "The work being performed by Gravitate and Informix is well targeted to addressing the technology gap currently delaying the deployment of advanced location-based services."
Informix provides spatially-enabled database management in its core line of databases: Informix Dynamic Server and Informix Internet Foundation. Complex spatial data can be accessed via standard SQL statements or through client-side geographical information system software. Informix`s R-tree indexing gives fast access to data and robust analytical capability.
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