Pervasive Acquisition Positions Actian as Big Data Contender

Actian Corporation announced Thursday it has finalized its acquisition of data integration vendor Pervasive Software.

Pervasive Software has consistently ranked as a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools and a strong contender in the Forrester Wave for Enterprise ETL.

Actian is best known for the Ingres Database, an open-source SQL relational database management system. The company has been around since 1980, but only rebranded last year as Actian, when it also shifted its marketing focus to Big Data.

Pervasive fits in with that vision, bringing to the table its Hadoop connectors and DataRush, a predictive data analytics engine.

In a press release on the merger, Robin Bloor, chief analyst and co-founder of the Bloor Group, said the deal was “a powerful merger” of two industry leaders, adding their technologies clearly complement each other.

“This is particularly the case in the area of highly parallelized and scale-up, scale-out data integration and database,” Bloor is quoted as saying. “In my view, the combination of these technologies will provide Actian with a performance capability for BI and Data Analytics which no other company can currently equal.”

In February, I interviewed Lance Speck, Pervasive’s vice president and general manager of integration products. He noted at the time that billing was a core area for the company. Interestingly enough, just two years ago, Speck told me Pervasive had benefited from consolidations in the integration market.

Information Week Executive Editor Doug Henschen opined in February that Actian is building a “mini Big Data empire” through the acquisition of Pervasive, the 2010 acquisition of the VectorWise analytical database, and object-store database vendor Versant, which it acquired in December for $37 million.

Henschen also reports the Pervasive deal cost Actian $161.9 million.