Sybase, Inc.

Sybase, Inc. was an American enterprise software company founded in 1984 in Berkeley, California by Robert Epstein and Mark Hoffman, later headquartered at One Sybase Drive, Dublin, California. It was a publicly traded corporation until SAP America, Inc. acquired it in July 2010 for roughly $5.8 billion enterprise value, making Sybase a wholly owned subsidiary of SAP. At the time of the deal Sybase reported about $1.1 billion in annual revenue and roughly 3,800–4,200 employees; SAP discontinued use of the Sybase brand in 2014, and Sybase is no longer an independent operating entity.

Products and operations. Sybase was a relational database and enterprise mobility vendor. Its flagship database, originally Sybase SQL Server (the technology Microsoft licensed to build Microsoft SQL Server) and later rebranded Adaptive Server Enterprise, plus Sybase IQ (columnar analytics), SQL Anywhere (mobile/embedded database), PowerBuilder and PowerDesigner development/modeling tools, and enterprise mobility and messaging platforms operated through its iAnywhere subsidiary. Customers concentrated in financial services, telecom, government and healthcare. After the acquisition these products were folded into SAP's database, analytics and mobility portfolio.

Litigation posture. Sybase appears in the tracked data as an operating company entangled with a patent assertion entity rather than as an active litigant of its own. The two tracked matters both involve Realtime Data LLC (d/b/a IXO), a well-known patent monetization entity: Realtime Data LLC d/b/a IXO v. SAP America, Inc. et al., where Sybase was a defendant in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas (a plaintiff-friendly venue), and SAP America, Inc. et al. v. Realtime Data LLC, an April 2016 Patent Trial and Appeal Board proceeding (an IPR-style challenge) in which Sybase appears on the petitioner side. That pairing — one defense against an NPE suit and one defensive PTAB challenge — is typical of an operating company fighting assertion claims, not of a company asserting its own portfolio offensively.

Context. The cases reflect the data-storage/compression technology area that Realtime Data has asserted broadly against database and storage vendors, and they arose after Sybase had already been absorbed into SAP, so the litigation was effectively conducted by and alongside its parent. No information in the tracked record indicates Sybase asserted patents as a plaintiff beyond the defensive PTAB filing against Realtime Data.