Sybase just finished its best quarter in the company’s history, not to mention its best year.
The company’s earnings per share, at 78 cents, beat analysts’ expectations by 17 cents. Total revenue was $305.1 million for the fourth quarter and $1.13 billion for the full year.
Marty Beard, president of Sybase 365, said the company overall produced products that performed well, including the analytics server product that queries vast amounts of data in real time to track trends such as TV viewing habits.
In the mobile messaging space, the company saw messaging volumes increase from 90 billion processed in 2007 to 210 billion in 2008. A lot of that growth is coming from the enterprise sector, where companies are using SMS to conduct customer service and marketing programs.
“The volumes continue to grow at historical rates,” he said, and there’s no indication the economic downturn is affecting messaging. If anything, flat-rate pricing and the popularity of SMS across demographics are boosting usage.
With the acquisition of paybox Solutions last week, the company expects to see more business in the mobile commerce and banking/payments space.
Sybase handles SMS traffic that moves between operators. For example, it doesn’t handle an SMS that moves from one China Mobile subscriber to another, but it handles messages that move from one carrier to another. About 35 percent to 40 percent of its total messaging revenue comes from the United States, home of the biggest volume. That said, the trend is going increasingly global, with traffic moving between countries you wouldn’t normally expect to see high traffic routes, he said.
Incidentally, did Sybase see a spike when President Barack Obama was inaugurated? Yes, he said, although the uptick wasn’t quite as high worldwide as the night he was elected.