Actian
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| Private | |
| Industry | Database management systems, Software, Big data analytics |
| Founded | 1980 |
| Website | www |
Actian is a computer software company headquartered in California, with offices in several countries resulting from a long history of companies and acquisitions, including Relational Technology, Inc., Ingres Corporation, VectorWise BV, Versant, Pervasive, and ParAccel.
Relational Technology, Incorporated (RTI), was founded in 1980 by Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, and professor Lawrence A. Rowe. Its initial public offering was held in May 1988 to raise $28 million. By this time, RTI had fierce competition in the database management system (DBMS) market, including Oracle Corporation (which had started with the similar name Relational Software Incorporated), Informix Corporation, and Sybase, but was one of the largest DBMS companies. RTI was renamed Ingres Corporation late in 1989.
ASK Computer Systems announced in September 1990 a deal in which ASK would acquire Ingres, funded partially by investments from Hewlett-Packard and Electronic Data Systems. The deal met resistance from a shareholder, but did complete by November 1990.Computer Associates (CA) acquired the ASK Group in 1994. Despite a loyal customer base, CA failed to develop the technology much further.
Ingres Corporation was spun out of CA as a separate private company in November 2005, with private equity firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital as largest shareholder. Terry Garnett served as interim chief executive, and CA retained a 25% interest. In July 2006 Roger Burkhardt became president. He promoted open source software, and helped form Open Source for America in 2009.
Ingres announced they had acquired the VectorWise technology in 2010, which had spun out from the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI, the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science) in 2008. In November 2010 Garnett & Helfrich Capital acquired the last 20% of equity in Ingres Corporation that it did not already own. In July 2011 Steve Shine became chief executive. In September 2011 Ingres changed its name to Actian, using the marketing phrase "Action Apps". CEO Steve Shine said the new focus would be on lower-cost sales for its cloud action platform. In late 2012, after rejecting an offer by Unicom Systems, Versant Corporation announced it agreed to be acquired by Actian, promoted using the term big data. It closed in December 2012 for an estimated $37 million. By January 2013, Actian also announced acquisition of Pervasive Software. It had originally offered about $154 million in August 2012, and closed in April 2013 for almost $162 million.
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