History of Sybase

Author

Epstein, Benjamin

Volume

35

Issue

2

fYear

2013

fDate

April-June 2013

Firstpage

31

Lastpage

41

Abstract

One of the cofounders of Sybase tells about the birth of the company in 1984 and its strategy for entering what appeared to be a crowded marketplace. The article discusses how they were able to raise the funding needed. It tracks the technical development of the initial product that supported Sun and DEC computers and was rapidly accepted by the Wall Street community. The technical advantages of Sybase are described along with its marketing thrust to compete with Oracle. It covers the business relationship with Microsoft and Ashton-Tate and how the product performed in benchmarking tests. The problems with acquisitions, growth, and competition are described. It concludes with the changes in management and the company´s acquisition by SAP.

Keywords

DP industry; corporate acquisitions; history; relational databases; SAP; Sybase history; acquisition problem; benchmarking test; business relationship; company acquisition; competition problem; growth problem; marketing thrust; relational database; Companies; Computer industry; Database systems; History; Investments; Marketing and sales; Strategic planning; Ashton-Tate; Microsoft; Oracle; Sybase; business computing; financial services; history of computing; relational database management systems;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1058-6180

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MAHC.2012.52

Filename

6297964