Actian is a computer software company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California that provides data management software. In July 2018, Actian was acquired by

HCL Technologies HCLTech (formerly Hindustan Computers Limited or HCL Technologies) is an Indian multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Noida.It emerged as an independent company in 1991 when HCL entered into ...

and Sumeru Equity Partners for $330 million. On December 31, 2021,

became the sole owner of Actian. Actian was founded in 2005, as a private equity funded spin-out of the Ingres product line from Computer Associates, and developed data management and integration technologies, including

Vectorwise Actian Vector (formerly known as VectorWise) is an SQL relational database management system designed for high performance in analytical database applications. It published record breaking results on the Transaction Processing Performance Coun ...

Btrieve Btrieve is a transactional database ( navigational database) software product. It is based on Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM), which is a way of storing data for fast retrieval. There have been several versions of the product for DOS, Li ...

Pervasive PSQL Actian Zen (named Pervasive PSQL before version 13) is an ACID-compliant database management system (DBMS) developed by Pervasive Software. It is optimized for embedding in applications and used in several different types of packaged software app ...

, and the Ingres database.

History

Ingres

Ingres was developed at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and commercialized by Relational Technology Inc. After a course of name changes and acquisitions, including VectorWise BV, Versant, Pervasive, and

ParAccel ParAccel, Inc. was a California-based software company. It provided a database management system designed to provide advanced analytics for business intelligence. ParAccel was acquired by Actian in April 2013. History ParAccel was a venture-b ...

, Actian came into existence as a multinational software firm. Relational Technology, Incorporated (RTI), was founded in 1980 by

Michael Stonebraker Michael Ralph Stonebraker (born October 11, 1943) is a computer scientist specializing in database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational databa ...

and Eugene Wong, and professor Lawrence A. Rowe to commercialize Ingres. Its

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...

was held in May 1988 to raise $28 million. By this time, RTI had competition in the database management system (DBMS) market, including Oracle Corporation (which had started with the similar name Relational Software Incorporated),

Informix Corporation Informix Corporation was a software company located in Menlo Park, California. It was a developer of relational database software for computers using the Unix, Microsoft Windows, and Apple Macintosh operating systems. Timeline * 1980: Relati ...

, 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.

OpenROAD

OpenROAD was the small-machine offering of the Ingres database. The suite included applications-by-forms (ABF), an early 4GL computer programming language. It provided an

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

form painter, which automatically bound form fields to a database using ABF, a programming language, with embedded SQL, simplifying the task of making a "

CRUD In computer programming, create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) are the four basic operations of persistent storage. CRUD is also sometimes used to describe user interface conventions that facilitate viewing, searching, and changing information u ...

" application for textual data. ABF source code was interpreted into a 3GL language ( C or COBOL), which is then compiled so snippets of the native language may be directly embedded in the ABF code. ABF was

deprecated In several fields, especially computing, deprecation is the discouragement of use of some terminology, feature, design, or practice, typically because it has been superseded or is no longer considered efficient or safe, without completely removing ...

by OpenROAD in the early nineties. Several other database vendors marketed comparable 4GLs at around the same time, such as Pick System Builder, Clipper, and DBASE III. ABF was deprecated by the OpenROAD business unit in the early nineties.

Relation to Computer Associates

Computer Associates CA Technologies, formerly known as CA, Inc. and Computer Associates International, Inc., is an American multinational corporation headquartered in New York City. It is primarily known for its business-to-business (B2B) software with a product po ...

(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 A private equity firm is an investment management company that provides financial backing and makes investments in the private equity of startup or operating companies through a variety of loosely affiliated investment strategies including lev ...

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 Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

, and helped form

Open Source for America Open Source for America (OSFA) consortium of various organizations established to advocate for and support the use of free and open-source software in the U.S. Federal government. It consists of various open source foundations, and companies, incl ...

in 2009. Ingres announced they had acquired the

VectorWise Actian Vector (formerly known as VectorWise) is an SQL relational database management system designed for high performance in analytical database applications. It published record breaking results on the Transaction Processing Performance Coun ...

technology in 2010, which had spun out from the

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica The (abbr. CWI; English: "National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science") is a research centre in the field of mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is part of the institutes organization of the Dutch Research Co ...

(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.

Vectorwise

Vectorwise originated from the X100 research project carried out within the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI, the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science) between 2003 and 2008. It was spun off as a start-up company in 2008, and acquired by Ingres Corporation in 2011. It was released as a commercial product in June, 2010, initially for 64-bit Linux platform, and later also for Windows. Starting from 3.5 release in April 2014, the product name was shortened to "Vector". In June 2014, Actian Vortex was announced - clustered

MPP MPP or M.P.P. may refer to: * Marginal physical product * Master of Public Policy, an academic degree * Member of Provincial Parliament (Ontario), Canada * Member of Provincial Parliament (Western Cape), South Africa * ''Merriweather Post Pavilio ...

version of Vector, working in

Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage an ...

with storage in

HDFS Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage ...

. Actian Vortex was later renamed to Actian Vector in Hadoop. Actian Vector (formerly known as VectorWise) is an SQL relational database management system designed for high performance in analytical database applications. In turn, Actian Vector became the core engine in Actian Avalanche.

Pervasive

Pervasive Software Pervasive Software was a company that developed software including database management systems and extract, transform and load tools. Pervasive Data Integrator and Pervasive Data Profiler are integration products, and the Pervasive PSQL relation ...

was a company that developed

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

including

database management systems In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

and extract, transform and load tools.

relational database management system was its primary data storage product. In December 2003 Pervasive acquired Data Junction Corporation, a privately held company with headquarters also in Austin which produced data and application integration tools renamed Pervasive Data Integrator and later DataConnect, for about

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

51.7 million in cash and stock shares. In 2013, Pervasive Software was acquired by Actian Corporation for $161.9 million, increased from an initial offer of $154 million.

Actian

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 Versant Object Database (VOD) is an object database software product developed by Versant Corporation. The Versant Object Database enables developers using object oriented languages to transactionally store their information by allowing the r ...

announced it agreed to be acquired by Actian, promoted using the term big data. It closed in December 2012 for an estimated $37 million. ParAccel was acquired by Actian in April 2013. Analysts expected Actian to market ParAccel for larger databases, and VectorWise for moderately sized applications. In February 2014, Forbes.com listed Actian at #5 in its "Top 10 Big Data Pure-Plays 2014" citing $138 million in Actian revenue for 2013. In August, 2016, it was reported that Actian had phased out its products promoted for big data, including the former ParAccel, VectorWise, and DataFlow technology. On November 1, 2016, Shine was replaced as chief executive by Rohit De Souza. A new chief financial officer and executive chairman were also appointed. In April, 2017, several products were renamed, including the combination of Ingres and the former Vector product into one product. Actian X, with new features. Actian released a product called Avalanche in March 2019 for use on the

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

(AWS) cloud. Lewis Black (previously chief financial officer) took over as CEO in 2020.

References

External links

Actian Corporation
{{Authority control Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Companies based in Palo Alto, California Software companies established in 1980 1980s initial public offerings 2018 mergers and acquisitions Software companies of the United States 1990 mergers and acquisitions