| Type | Corporation |
|---|---|
| Traded as | NASDAQ: VSNT |
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 1988 |
| Headquarters | Redwood City, California, USA |
| Key people | Bernhard Woebker, CEO |
| Products | Object Database |
| Revenue | 25,3 million USD (2008) |
Versant Corporation (VSNT) is a publicly-traded company and a vendor of database management software. Versant products are deployed in a wide variety of industries including: Telecommunications, Defense, Life Sciences, Transportation, Finance, Online Gaming and more. Versant was founded in Fremont, California (USA) in 1988. It is currently headquartered in Redwood City, California where all activities related to finances and customer service take place. The development team is located in the branch offices in Hamburg (Germany) and Pune (India).
Versant offers object database technologies, namely, "Versant Object Database", "Versant FastObjects" and the open source database "db4o".
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The company was founded and created 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, Dr. CP Chou and others. Dr. Ong, who came from Ingres, recognized that languages were changing, becoming OO and leveraged work done at the University of Wisconsin (known as the WISC storage system[1]) to create a commercial object database to complement OO languages.
In early 1990 the company was renamed to Versant Object Technology and in 1993 David Banks took over as CEO and then in late 1997 Nick Ordon. Since 1996 Versant has been traded on NASDAQ under the stock symbol "VSNT" and the ISIN US9252843092/ WKN AOF69L. In 1999 the company was renamed again to Versant Corporation.
The core market for Versant's technology were builders of high performance database solutions for high end UNIX systems.
In March 2004, Versant acquired Poet Software GmbH a similar company with a European focus and primarily Windows product target market. In 2005, Jochen Witte, President of Poet Software, took over as CEO of Versant Corporation.
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.
Versant's last acquisition was in December 2008, when it acquired db4objects Inc., the developer and provider of the open source database technology "db4o".
Versant currently markets two commercial object databases (OODBMS), "Versant Object Database" and "Versant FastObjects". In addition, Versant offers the open source database "db4o" which they have acquired in 2008.
Versant runs global trading platforms for the worlds largest stock exchanges, network management for the worlds largest telecommunications providers, intelligence analytics for defense agencies, reservation systems for the largest airline/hotel companies, risk management analytics for banking and transportation organizations, massive multi-player gaming systems, network security and fraud detection, local number portability, advanced simulations, social networking, etc., etc. as a representative set of industries and applications exhibiting those characteristics.
Usually the "best kind of application" to use a Versant database are those applications requiring an application specific database of an OLTP nature. In other words, a non-traditional I.T. type of transactional application. That being said, there are certain characteristics, which when exhibited in an application, indicate a stronger value add by Versant. Those characteristics are: complex models, large amount of data, large number of concurrent users. Any one of those three characteristics starts down a path of Versant value and at the extreme end, where you have all of those characteristics, Versant provides clear distinguishing value. The whole reason Versant still exists is that it provides better performance and scalability for applications with the above characteristics over traditional relational technology. To that end, Versant is found in applications within many different vertical industries where those characteristics come into play.