Informix

Roger Sippl founded Relational Database Systems in 1980, and the company later took the name of its product. Informix was a fixture on Unix servers, helped along by the Informix-4GL development language. In 1996 it bought Michael Stonebraker's Illustra, whose object-relational technology, descended from Postgres, became Informix Universal Server.

The following year it emerged that revenue had been booked for deals that did not exist. Results had to be restated by hundreds of millions of dollars, and CEO Phil White was later convicted for his part in it. IBM bought the database business in 2001 for roughly a billion dollars, mainly for the customers. The product is still maintained, and turns up in retail point-of-sale systems more often than you might expect.