Sybase’s iAnywhere division is porting its SQL Anywhere mobile database to Research In Motion (RIM) BlackBerry devices, officials at the RIM Wireless Enterprise Symposium said today.

Previously the software was only available for the PalmOS, Symbian and Windows Mobile. But now, “We’re starting to see a lot more interest from our partners and enterprise customers… who really want to do line-of-business applications,” said Chris Kleisath, senior director of engineering at Sybase.

Older versions of BlackBerry devices, although commercially popular, could not run a Java Virtual Machine program well enough to support the Sybase product. “We’ve been looking at the BlackBerry products for years, way back before they even had a phone integrated into them. The hardware was such that it had limited capabilities,” Kleisath explained.

The new version will be part of SQL Anywhere 11.0, which Sybase announced last month and is due to ship later this year, and will run on devices with at least BlackBerry OS 4.1. Other new features include parallelism and full-text search, officials previously said. Also new in 11.0 are synchronization support for IBM, Microsoft and Oracle databases and the ability to program using Microsoft .NET or the Pearl scripting language, added Mike Paola, director of product management.

Beyond BlackBerrys, “the [Apple] iPhone is certainly of interest to us with the SDK that was recently released. We’re certainly paying attention to that,” Kleisath added.