Persistence Software was an American

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

company that operated from 1991 to 2004. Persistence was based in

San Mateo, California San Mateo ( ) is the most populous city in San Mateo County, California, United States, on the San Francisco Peninsula. It is part of the San Francisco Bay Area metropolitan region, and is located about south of San Francisco. San Mateo border ...

, founded in 1991 by Derek Henninger, Christopher Keene, and Richard Jensen, and developed software for object-relational mapping. In 1999, Persistence Software went public on

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market (; National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list ...

under the ticker symbol PRSW. In 2004,

Progress Software Progress Software Corporation is an American public company that produces software for creating and deploying business applications. Founded in Burlington, Massachusetts with offices in 16 countries, the company posted revenues of $531.3 mill ...

bought Persistence.

History

Persistence Software was founded in 1991 by Derek Henninger, Christopher Keene, and Richard Jensen in

. The company started life as a spinoff from

Lighthouse Design Lighthouse Design Ltd. was an American software company that operated from 1989 to 1996. Lighthouse developed software for NeXT computers running the NeXTSTEP operating system. The company was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner, Jonatha ...

. As the original

NeXTSTEP NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT, founded by Steve Jobs, in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its ...

computer shipped with a relational database and

Objective-C Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style message passing (messaging) to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was ...

, Lighthouse engineers created a simple mapping utility called Exploder to store objects in a relational database. The Persistence team worked with

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

's professors

Gio Wiederhold Giovanni Corrado Melchiore Wiederhold (June 24, 1936 – December 26, 2022) was an Italian-born American computer scientist who spent most of his career at Stanford University. His research focused on the design of large-scale database manageme ...

an
Arthur M Keller
who was the chief technical advisor, to extend the object-relational mapping technology by adding the concepts of mapping related objects. Persistence created a series of products that integrated object-to-relational mapping, caching, and cache synchronization with automated cache management. The products were marketed under the names PowerTier, EdgExtend, and DirectAlert.

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

licensed the Persistence technology in 1998, which was later incorporated into the

Enterprise JavaBeans Jakarta Enterprise Beans (EJB; formerly Enterprise JavaBeans) is one of several Java APIs for modular construction of enterprise software. EJB is a server-side software component that encapsulates business logic of an application. An EJB web ...

standard. In 2004,

bought Persistence for $16 million.

References

{{Reflist

External links

PowerTier overview from ServerWatch

Defunct software companies of the United States Software companies based in California Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Software companies established in 1991 Software companies disestablished in 2004 1991 establishments in California 2004 disestablishments in California