History
The company was founded by Dr. Kee Ong in 1988 as "Object Sciences Corporation" in Fremont, California (USA). Among the first employees were CEO Michael Seashols and kernel engineers Dr. Hong-Tai Chou, Stephen Au-Yeung, and Dr. CP Chou. Dr. Ong, who previously worked with the open-source relational database Ingres, recognized that languages were expanding to include object-orientated programming (OO) and leveraged work done at the University of Wisconsin (known as the WISC storage system) to create a commercial object-oriented database to complement OO languages.
In early 1990 the company was renamed “Versant Object Technology.” In 1993 David Banks took over as CEO. In 1996 Versant went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange and traded under the symbol “VSNT.” In 1997 Nick Ordon succeeded Banks as CEO. In 1999 the company was renamed again to “Versant Corporation.”
In March 2004, Versant acquired Poet Software GmbH, a complementary European-focused company targeting the Windows product market. In 2005, Jochen Witte, former President of Poet Software, took over as CEO of Versant Corporation. Versant's most recent acquisition was db4objects Inc. in 2008, the developer and provider of the open source embedded database technology "db4o".
The original implementation of Versant was targeted at C, C++ and Smalltalk users. In 1995 Versant introduced support for the Java language and then in 2009 for C# and the .NET platform. In 2012 Versant introduced a JPA 2.0 compliant interface for its object database, “Versant JPA” with a technical preview of an Analytics platform including Hadoop support, to address the scalability, speed and concurrency issues related to Big Data challenges.
In late 2012, after rejecting an offer by Unicom Systems Inc., Versant Corporation announced that it was being acquired by Actian Corporation, the current developer of the Ingres open source database and the SQL relational database, Vectorwise. The acquisition was heralded by the industry as a marriage of two Big Data players that would be an “enterprise big data database pure-play to be reckoned with going forward.”
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