Versant Corporation was an American-based software company building specialized NoSQL data management systems. Versant was founded in Menlo Park, California (USA) in 1988. It was headquartered in Redwood City, California.
It was noted in 2005 that the market share for object oriented databases held by Versant was "very small" compared to IBM and Oracle.[2] However, two years earlier, Versant ODBMS and IBM UniData were mentioned side-by-side as "two of the most recent examples of object-oriented database software" in a bestselling database design text.[3]
History
The company was founded by Dr. Kee Ong in August 1988 as "Object Sciences Corporation". Ong previously worked with the open-source relational database management system Ingres. Around this time object-oriented programming (OO) became popular, and the company used research done at the University of Wisconsin[4] for a commercial database system to complement OO languages. The company's initial executive team included Michael Seashols (CEO), Dr. Kee Ong (CTO), John Hughes (VP, Sales), Dr. Mary Loomis (VP, Services) and Susan Dickerson (VP, Business Development).