Embarcadero took its name from the San Francisco waterfront and sold tools to some of the least glamorous people in tech. Database administrators kept a company's orders, customers and accounts alive. Embarcadero gave them software to design databases, move changes safely and find slow queries. It went public in April 2000, weeks after the Nasdaq peak, selling the kind of plain, useful software that outlasts a bubble.

One Tool for Every Database

Stephen Wong, Stuart Browning and Nigel Myers founded Embarcadero in October 1993. Big companies ran databases from Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and Sybase side by side, each with its own tools. Embarcadero's bet was that administrators would pay for one set of tools that worked across all of them. Products like DBArtisan and ER/Studio became standard kit in many corporate IT departments.

Private Hands, Then Delphi

Embarcadero priced its IPO at $10 a share in April 2000 and listed on Nasdaq as EMBT. It rode out the crash as a small public company. In 2007 the private equity firm Thoma Cressey Bravo bought the company and took it private. A year later Embarcadero bought CodeGear, the Borland unit behind the Delphi programming tools. In 2015 it became part of Idera.

Cover: Ferry boat on the Yodo River, Teisai Hokuba. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a ferry at the landing (embarcadero means a boat landing).