Actian
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Analyst Coverage: Philip Howard and David Norfolk
What was originally Relational Technologies Incorporated, founded in 1980, became Ingres Corporation in 1989. It was acquired by the ASK Group in 1990 which was itself acquired by CA in 1994. Ingres was spun out of CA in 2005 and was renamed as Actian in 2011. In 2018 the company was 80% acquired by HCL Technologies, which is a company headquartered in India but with offices around the globe. The company has more than 120,000 employees.
Actian, which operates separately from HCL, also has a significant history of acquisitions including VectorWise (relational database) in 2011, Versant (object-oriented database) in 2012, and ParAccel (data warehousing) and Pervasive Software (databases and data integration software) in 2013.
The company’s current focus is on “hybrid” data management, by which it means both hybrid (not just structured) data and hybrid (cloud and on-premises) data management. It has four major products: Actian Avalanche which is a cloud-based data warehouse, which leverages the Actian Vector database; Actian Zen, which is an edge-focused database based on what was previously Pervasive PSQL (and, before that, Btrieve); Actian DataConnect, which is a data integration offering based on Pervasive Dataflow and other Pervasive capabilities; and Actian X, which is a transactional database with analytic capabilities aimed at the HTAP market. Actian X is, in effect, the latest release of Ingres but it also includes the Actian Vector columnar database engine to support analytic queries. In addition to these four major offerings the company continues to market and support the OpenROAD 4GL.