ActiveState

ActiveState Software Inc is a Canadian software company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. It develops, sells, and supports cross-platform development tools and secure software supply chain solutions for dynamic languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl, as well as enterprise services.

ActiveState Software Inc.

Company type	Private
Industry	Computer software
Founded	1997
Headquarters	Vancouver, British Columbia , Canada
Area served	Global
Key people	Stephen Baker (CEO)
Products	ActiveState Platform, ActivePerl, ActivePython, ActiveTcl, Komodo IDE
Number of employees	>60
Website	activestate.com

ActiveState is owned by its employees and Vertu Capital, a growth equity firm based in Ontario, Canada^[1] after briefly being a member of the Sophos group.^[2]

History

Acquisition of ActiveState Corp was first announced in September 2003 by Sophos Plc. ActiveState's president Steve Munford, who is part of the acquisition will become a member of Sophos's executive management team as Global VP Messaging.^[3][4]

Sophos ownership era

In January 2006, the Pender Financial Group, which was announced in January 2006 has agreed with Sophos Inc. to acquire ActiveState Software Inc.^[5]

In February 2006, ActiveState Software Inc. announced its acquisition by Pender Financial Group Corporation from Sophos Inc., a subsidiary of Sophos Plc., for the purchase price of 2,250,000 USD. Following the acquisition, Bart Copeland will become ActiveState Software Inc.'s President and CEO, and Dr. David Ascher will become ActiveState Software Inc.'s CTO and VP of Engineering.^[6] Following the sales of ActiveState to PFG, David Ascher of ActiveState revealed that Sophos agreed to sell ActiveState because developing programming tools did not fit Sophos's business model.^[7]

Pender Financial Group ownership era

ActiveState was named one of Canada's Top 100 Employers in October 2006 as it was published in Maclean's magazine, along with several other software companies.^[8]

Licensing change

Somewhere around 2013 the licensing model for ActiveState products changed from paid support to paid commercial use.^{[9][better source needed]}

Subsidiaries

• Phenona: In June 2011, ActiveState Software Inc. announced the acquisition of Phenona.^[10][11]
• Appsecute Limited: In June 2013, ActiveState Software Inc. announced the acquisition of Appsecute.^[12] The acquisition would become ActiveState's strategy to pair Appsecute with Stackato.^[13]

Products

• Current ActiveState products include: ActiveState Platform cross-platform automated build tool for Perl, Python, Ruby and Tcl; free and commercial language distributions, ActivePerl, ActivePython, and ActiveTcl for AIX, HP-UX, Linux, OS X, Solaris, and Windows.
• Former ActiveState products include: ActiveState Komodo, an integrated development environment (IDE) for dynamic languages which is now open source;^[14] Perl Dev Kit (PDK) and Tcl Dev Kit (TDK), which have been sunset.^[15][16]

ActiveState Platform

Automatically builds Python, Perl, Ruby and Tcl packages from source code on demand, and packages them as runtime environments for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Features a zero-config cloud-based build system that implements the Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) standard.^[17]

Komodo

• Komodo 11: Features Smart and responsive autocomplete browser and overall performance symbol for faster performance.^[18]
• Komodo 12: Autocomplete becomes more reliable and activates from any position and using one click to control, the package manager and execute commands directly inside the file, supporting Python (pip), PHP (Composer), Perl (PPM), Ruby (Gem), and Node.js (npm and Yarn).^[19]

Python

ActivePython is a software package consisting of the Python (programming language) implementation CPython and a set of extensions, packaged to facilitate installation.^[20] As of 2006, it ran on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX platforms.^[21] ActivePython for Windows includes the PyWin32 extensions for programming with the Win32 API.^[22] It also includes the integrated development environment IDLE, although this requires manual setup.^[23]

Stackato

In February 2012, ActiveState announced the general availability of Stackato. According to the announcement, Stackato "makes it easy to develop, deploy, migrate, scale, manage, and monitor applications on any cloud", and is available in Enterprise, Micro Cloud, and Sandbox editions.^[24]

In December 2012, ActiveState announced the OEM integration of Stackato with HP Cloud Services, specifically the HP Cloud Application Platform as a Service.^[25] HP describes the product as "an application platform for development, deployment, and management of cloud applications using any language on any stack".^[26][27]

On July 28, 2015, Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. announced the acquisition of Stackato's business from ActiveState Software Inc.^[28][29][30]

Enterprise CI/CD

ActiveState confirmed that its Enterprise CI / CD Survey is available for participation by 2020. Based on how businesses commonly utilize CI / CD and how they address software runtime and create issues, the study is part of ActiveState's ongoing initiatives to promote the development of open-source technology.^[31]

References

1. "Vertu Capital Acquires Secure Open Source Integration Platform Company, ActiveState". November 7, 2023.
2. Bennett, Amy (September 24, 2003). "Sophos buys antispam vendor ActiveState for $23M". Computerworld. Retrieved June 10, 2022.^{[permanent dead link]}
3. "Sophos acquires anti-spam specialist ActiveState". www.sophos.com. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
4. "Sophos acquires anti-spam specialist ActiveState". Computerworld. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
5. "ActiveState To Spin Out". January 30, 2006. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
6. "ActiveState Acquired by Employees and Pender Financial Group; Company Renews Focus on Tools and Solutions for Dynamic Languages". www.businesswire.com. February 22, 2006. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
7. . November 9, 2006. Archived from the original on November 9, 2006. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
8. "Reasons for Selection, 2007 Canada's Top 100 Employers". Archived from the original on August 2, 2012. Retrieved June 26, 2007.
9. Dunstan, Andrew (December 4, 2013). "Andrew Dunstan's PostgreSQL and Technical blog: ActiveState make ActivePerl non-free". Retrieved December 6, 2018.
10. "ActiveState Acquires Perl Cloud Company, Phenona, to Accelerate Cloud Strategy". June 14, 2011. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
11. Clarke, Gavin (June 14, 2011). "Teen sells Perl cloud startup to ActiveState". The Register. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
12. "ActiveState Acquires Appsecute: Private-PaaS Leader Purchases Social DevOps Solutions Provider". June 4, 2013. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
13. Copeland, Bart (June 5, 2013). "Going Social: Why ActiveState Acquired Appsecute". Retrieved December 6, 2018.
14. "ActiveState Komodo IDE Now Open Source". December 6, 2022. Retrieved January 12, 2023.
15. "Perl Dev Kit (PDK) is Now End of Life". February 20, 2020. Retrieved January 12, 2023.
16. "Tcl Dev Kit (TDK) Now End of Life". February 20, 2020. Retrieved January 12, 2023.
17. "Software Supply Chain Security". Retrieved January 12, 2023.
18. Armstrong, Alex (September 26, 2017). "Komodo 11 With Revamped Code Intelligence". I Programmer. Retrieved May 5, 2020.
19. Vaggalis, Nikos (January 23, 2020). "ActiveState Komodo IDE Now Free". I Programmer. Retrieved May 5, 2020.
20. Boswell, William (2003). Inside Windows Server 2003. Addison-Wesley Professional. p. 717.
21. Martelli, Alex (2006). Python in a Nutshell. O'Reilly. p. 19.
22. Martelli, Alex; Ravenscroft, Anna; Ascher, David (2005). Python Cookbook. O'Reilly. p. 326.
23. Langtangen, Hans Petter (2013). Python Scripting for Computational Science. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 660.
24. "ActiveState Unveils Stackato 1.0, the Application Platform for Creating a Private PaaS". February 29, 2012.
25. "ActiveState Announces HP OEM Licensing Agreement for Platform as a Service with Stackato". December 6, 2012.
26. . Archived from the original on January 29, 2013.
27. Cohen, Reuven. "HP Unveils Cloud Application Platform Powered by ActiveState". Forbes.
28. "HP Buys ActiveState's PaaS, Stackato". InformationWeek.
29. . Archived from the original on May 6, 2016.
30. "ActiveState's Stackato (Cloud Foundry & Docker Based PaaS) Acquired by HP". July 29, 2015.
31. "ActiveState Launches Enterprise CI/CD Survey 2020". yahoo! finance. May 29, 2020. from the original on June 16, 2020. Retrieved June 16, 2020.

External links

• ActiveState Company site
• ActiveState Code site