In the mid-1990s Californian database firm Sybase looked set to give Oracle a run for its money.

But a period of lost focus and over-ambition caused the company to hit a low, with analyst Gartner estimating a 70 per cent chance of a takeover.

In 1997, after a management shake-up, Hong Kong-born John Chen joined the company as president with a brief to help turn its fortunes around.

A year later he was made chief executive and chairman, and he has since delivered 26 profitable quarters, with revenues of $788.5m (£444.8m) last year.

'When I joined, the company was strategically troubled. Part of the reason was, although we had great technology, we missed the application wave and because of that we started losing money and direction,' says Chen.

'We were wandering aimlessly, and rather than focusing on what we were good at we started looking at how we could compete with other people.'

Sybase had two choices. One was to try to catch up with what it had already missed out on - tempting for Chen, with businesses investing heavily in new applications for year 2000 projects at the time.

'I thought about it and decided we were a day too late and a dollar short,' he says. 'Companies such as PeopleSoft and Oracle were well established and we were nowhere near their size.'

The alternative was to try to leapfrog the competition and become a market leader in something entirely new.

'It was riskier and hard to convince people. We needed to make the company more financially viable and number one at something. So after a lot of discussion we decided we wanted to be the leader in mobility for enterprise users,' he says.

While maintaining its interest in the traditional database market by building its Adaptive Server Enterprise, SQL and Sybase IQ products, Chen says he recognised the growth opportunity for moving data and applications traditionally fixed within the walls of the enterprise to workers wanting to make decisions and automate processes while on the move.

Chen highlights how Britannia Airways is working with Sybase and systems integrator LogicaCMG to provide wireless connectivity to 1,800 cabin crew and 450 pilots wanting to access email, rosters, health and safety applications and flight manuals.

By using mobile middleware to synchronise back-office information to onboard devices, Britannia has been able to reduce check-in times and fuel requirements.

'The market has moved very rapidly,' says Chen. 'In the beginning there was a lot of negative criticism from analysts saying we were crazy, but today we are number one in the market for embedded databases and mobile middleware. We are now branching into all sorts of things.'

Sybase's Unwired Enterprise strategy, aimed at building an infrastructure which delivers relevant information to employees anytime, anywhere, has been bolstered by its mobile and embedded computing subsidiary iAnywhere.

Over the past few years iAnywhere has also added to in-house research and development through a series of acquisitions. Most recently it acquired Avaki and UK-based ISDD.

'We decided that there were many pieces of technology we needed to acquire. We needed to be able to acquire and then fit it into our architecture and needs. AvantGo is a technology that can help with downloads, XcelleNet is about encryption and security, Dejima is for natural language processing, and ISDD helps find unstructured data,' says Chen.

With Sybase ending its last financial year with more than $750m (£426m) in the bank, further spending sprees are on the cards. Chen says he is looking to make acquisitions in areas including unstructured data, radio frequency identification (RFID) analytics and mobile middleware.

'But because the market is so new there isn't really a firm we can acquire for market share reasons, so we need to make sure we are trailblazing,' he says.

Elsa Lion, wireless software analyst at Ovum, says that the Unwired Enterpris e strategy is important for trying to bring together the two separate database and iAnywhere divisions, but Sybase still has some way to go before full integration.

'iAnywhere is one of the leading suppliers of wireless middleware, but I'm not convinced that the whole of the Sybase group understands what the strengths of its products or AvantGo are,' she says. 'They have some very interesting products but I'm not sure they are all linking yet.'

But by connecting the two subsidiaries and muscling into the RFID market, Sybase could gain some ground in a wireless middleware market seemingly receiving little attention from Oracle, she says.

Chen also believes Oracle has been slow to move into the mobile middleware market, but says it is only a matter of time before the software giant goes beyond RFID.

'In some ways Oracle has decided to become an applications company and believes it needs to grow through massive consumption,' says Chen. 'But it's my belief that once Oracle comes out of this destruction period it will need to come up with a solution in the mobility space.'

But if database giant Oracle does decide to target this market aggressively, will Sybase find itself in a similar precarious situation to the mid-1990s?

'I doubt it will come up with something as good as we have because we have been working on this for a long time,' says Chen. 'We started on our Unwired Enterprise strategy five to seven years ago and have developed technology that has given us the credibility.

'I'm determined not to let history repeat itself in the mobility world.'