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Lights, camera, Actian! Open-source database biz sold for $300m
Indian outsourcer HCL and private equity outfit SEP open their wallet
HCL Technologies and Sumeru Equity Partners have slurped privately-owned database (DB) supplier Actian for $330m from current owner Garnett Helfrich Capital.
Indian-based IT services biz HCL, will own 80 per cent ($264mn) of Actian with SEP having the other 20 per cent ($66m). Actian will operate as a separate entity, led by current CEO and President, Rohit De Souza.
Actian's tech assets include Vector, which it claimed is the world’s fastest columnar DB; hybrid cloud data integration platform DataConnect; and hybrid DB, X, which merges Ingres relational and Vector analytics.
C Vijayakumar, HCL’s President and CEO, said the buy will beef up its data management tools and platforms to make a hybrid system - combining transactionsal and analytics data.
Actian, or Ingres as it once was, has always stood under the shadow of market giants including Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. Here's a potted history of the business:
- 1980 - Relational Technology Inc founded,
- 1989 - RTI rebranded to Ingres,
- 1990 - ASK Group wolfed down declining Ingres for $110mn,
- 1994 - Computer Associates (CA) bought declining ASK Group for $310mn,
- 2005 - CA spun out Ingres Corporation to Garnett Helfrich Capital,
- 2010 - Ingres buys Vectorwise,
- Late 2010 - Ingres changed name to Actian (a play on Action Applications,)
- 2011 - Steve Shine became CEO,
- December 2012 - Actian acquired Versant for $37mn, with the Versant product eventually becoming Actian NoSQL database,
- April 2013 - Actian slurped Pervasive Software for $162mn,
- November 2016 - Shine era ended with exec re-org as board member David Murphy became exec chairman, Gregg Hampton was new CFO and Rohit de Souza the CEO.
- April 2017 - Ingres and former Vector product combined in new Actian X product. ®