Ingres was developed at the University of California, Berkeley and commercialized by Relational Technology Inc. After a course of name changes and acquisitions, including VectorWise BV, Versant, Pervasive, and ParAccel, Actian came into existence as a multinational software firm.

Relational Technology, Incorporated (RTI), was founded in 1980 by Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, and professor Lawrence A. Rowe to commercialize Ingres.

[12] Ingres announced they had acquired the VectorWise technology in 2010, which had spun out from the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI, the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science) in 2008.

[18] In August, 2016, it was reported that Actian had phased out its products promoted for big data, including the former ParAccel, VectorWise, and DataFlow technology.

In late 2012, after rejecting an offer by Unicom Systems, Versant announced it agreed to be acquired by Actian, promoted using the term big data.

[32] ParAccel was a California-based software company that developed a database management system designed to provide advanced analytics for business intelligence.

[32][38][39] In August 2024, HCLSoftware announced its intent to acquire the French metadata management platform startup Zeenea for €24 million.

[44] It offers a fully managed hybrid cloud data warehouse service designed from the ground up to deliver high performance at scale on commodity infrastructure (running on Kubernetes), using Vector as the core database engine (a vectorized, MPP, fully ANSI SQL compliant RDBMS).

[46] In June 2014, Actian Vortex was announced - clustered MPP version of Vector, working in Hadoop with storage in HDFS.

Ingres is a proprietary SQL relational database management system intended to support large commercial and government applications.

On April 18, 2017, Actian X was introduced as the first natively integrated hybrid database, unifying transactional and analytic processing within a single platform.

It leverages a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) engine with a Java API and no dependency to MapReduce, thus avoiding its pitfalls, while enabling efficient parallel processing and reducing memory usage.

It integrates with Hadoop environments and supports analytics at scale, making it a powerful tool for enterprise data operations.

Actian Business Xchange is a managed B2B integration-as-a-service platform that enables trading partners to exchange electronic procurement and supply chain documents regardless of format or enterprise system.

[58] HCL Informix is a multi-model database management system, with a modular architecture, enabling it be used for enterprise applications or embedded solutions.