The founder of Informix started Visigenic to connect everything Informix's rivals had built. Corporate software in 1996 was a tangle of databases from Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft and others, and applications that could not talk to each other. Visigenic sold the connectors. VisiODBC let one program read many databases. VisiBroker let objects running on different machines call each other over a network, using the CORBA standard. Netscape and Microsoft were among its partners.

The Informix Founder Returns

Roger Sippl had founded Informix, the database company, and co-founded Vantive. He started Visigenic in San Mateo in February 1993 and served as its CEO. The first business was database connectivity. In 1996 Visigenic bought PostModern Computing Technologies, which made distributed object software, and that became VisiBroker. The bet was that the internet would turn corporate software into pieces spread across many machines, all needing a common language.

Folded Into Borland

Visigenic priced its IPO at $7.50 a share in August 1996 and traded on Nasdaq as VSGN. Database makers and operating system vendors threatened to build the same connections into their own products. In late 1997 Borland agreed to buy Visigenic in a stock deal, giving holders 0.81988 of a Borland share for each Visigenic share. The merger closed in early 1998, and VisiBroker lived on inside Borland's tools.

Cover: Bridge, Amsterdam, James McNeill Whistler. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a bridge over a canal (connecting systems).