Sybase is set to expand its offerings for remote and mobile systems with the acquisition of XcelleNet for about $95 million, the company announced Friday.

With the acquisition, Sybase will gain XcelleNet software for managing remote and mobile security, network connections and devices, according to a Sybase statement. The new capabilities will become part of Sybase's Unwired Enterprise product and XcelleNet will become part of Sybase's iAnywhere Solutions subsidiary. The all-cash deal is expected to close in the second quarter of this year.

Sybase, in Dublin, Calif., also expects to gain about 2,200 customers worldwide through privately held XcelleNet, which is based in Alpharetta, Ga., and has offices in several European cities.

The company's Unwired Enterprise offering includes database, data synchronization, application design and middleware components as well as information delivery systems for mobile devices. Sybase last year completed its acquisition of AvantGo and integrated AvantGo's mobile information service into Unwired Enterprise.

The latest acquisition will add to that toolkit device management and application management, said Terry Stepien, president of iAnywhere. Customers have been asking for those capabilities so they can keep track of the devices in the field and update the software on a broad range of devices that use different kinds of networks, he said.

XcelleNet has software to support a broad range of remote and mobile access types, from notebook computers on dial-up to Research In Motion Blackberry devices on GPRS connections. A single device may use different networks at different times, such as in a police department where in-car notebooks use GPRS on the road and Wi-Fi in the police station parking lot, said Joan Herbig, XcelleNet's CEO. In that situation, XcelleNet software can sense the change and hold back bandwidth-intensive tasks until the device gets on to the faster network, she said.

"The customers don't want to have to worry about switching certain settings based on what they're doing," Herbig said.

Integration of the two companies' technology may lead to new offerings for machine-to-machine communication, such as RFID (radio frequency identification) on retail products, Stepien said. That will require mobile database and data synchronization capabilities along with device management, he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.