I would suggest that you take a look at the Deploying Databases and Applications section with the documentation.

Wrt making the application part of a standard OS image, this should not be a problem provided that you:

• have appropriately licensed the software for use on all of the computers to which you will deploy the application
• you are either using the Personal Server (dbengX) or if using the Network Server (dbsrvX) that you uniquely name the server so that there are no name collisions on your network - including the name of the host within the server name is a easy way of resolving this issue.

We've also just published a new whitepaper titled "Embedding SQL Anywhere in Commercial Applications Requiring a Database" in which four deployment methods are discussed (Deployment Wizard, Copy Files, InstallShield and Silent Install).

When you create the OS image, just deploy SQL Anywhere using one the methods described in the whitepaper. As Mark suggests, pay special attention to the database server licensing and network database server name.

You can find the whitepaper at http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1093518.

Assuming that you are not installing server engines (dbsrvxx.exe - ie a database server that can be accessed over the network), and you have the licencing side covered, that should work fine.

It might be worth giving a bit more detail in case other people have relevant experience. You say "deploying this application into our environment to workstations as a backend to an application" - does each workstation have its own database, or are you installing clients connecting to a single backend database? What imaging solution are you using, etc?