Sybase

» see sybase.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Sybase was founded in Berkeley in 1984 by Robert Epstein, Mark Hoffman, Jane Doughty and Tom Haggin, under the name Systemware. It never had a consumer face and it never wanted one. This is a grave for a product I have never run, in a category that reached me only through the thing it turned into, which is an honest enough place to write from.

The first release, Sybase SQL Server, landed in 1987 and it was built around an idea that reads as obvious now and was not then: put the work on the server and let the client machine stay stupid. It was fast at high transaction volumes, and that took it straight into banks. For most of the 1990s Sybase was the database on trading floors, and its main argument against Oracle was that it did not fall over when the volume spiked.

The company crossed a billion dollars in revenue in 2007, which is a respectable number and also a much smaller one than its position in the 1993 market would have predicted. By then it had repositioned around mobile middleware through its iAnywhere division, and that repositioning is what made it an acquisition target rather than a slow fade.

~ the case file ~

~ the code microsoft kept ~

In 1988 Sybase licensed its engine to Microsoft, and Ashton-Tate and Microsoft shipped SQL Server 1.0 for OS/2 in May 1989. For several years Microsoft SQL Server was Sybase code with a different label on the box. The partnership came apart in the mid-1990s and the two companies went separate ways, Microsoft keeping source rights and rewriting the engine over the following decade.

The inheritance is still visible if you know where to look. Transact-SQL is the shared dialect. The system tables and the stored-procedure syntax have common ancestors, and anybody who has moved between the two products has noticed the family resemblance. Microsoft SQL Server now runs on a large fraction of the corporate machines on earth, and the company that wrote its first version does not exist.

~ powerbuilder and what it dragged in ~

In February 1995 Sybase paid around 900 million dollars for Powersoft, which made PowerBuilder, a client-server development tool that a whole generation of in-house business applications was written in. Powersoft had itself bought Watcom the year before, so the deal also handed Sybase the Watcom C compiler and the little database that became SQL Anywhere.

PowerBuilder is the part of the estate with the longest tail. SAP handed development of it to Appeon under an agreement announced in July 2016, and it is still being sold and updated thirty years after Powersoft shipped it. Somewhere there is a payroll system from 1997 still running on it.

~ how the name went away ~

SAP announced the acquisition in May 2010 and completed it on 30 July at 65 dollars a share, a total of about 5.8 billion dollars. Sybase then spent three years as a wholly-owned subsidiary marketed as "Sybase, an SAP company".

On 1 January 2014 SAP stopped using the name. Adaptive Server Enterprise became SAP ASE and Sybase IQ became SAP IQ. Plenty of customers found out from a renamed support portal rather than from an announcement. Today sybase.com still resolves and issues a redirect, landing you on a page inside sap.com filed under "acquired brands". A corporate site with a section for the names it has absorbed is a graveyard with a nicer URL.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »