Roger J. Sippl

Roger J. Sippl (born February 22, 1955), an American entrepreneur in the computer software industry, was described in 2012 by The Wall Street Journal as a serial entrepreneur. Sippl was the founder and CEO of Informix Corporation, later becoming IBM Informix. Other sippl accomplishments included being co-founder and chairman of Vantive Corporation, and the CEO and founder of Visigenic: three companies he took public. Currently, he is the CEO of Elastic Intelligence located in Menlo Park, California.

Early life and education Roger J. Sippl, the sixth of seven children, grew up in Wausau, Wisconsin. His father Charles J. Sippl Jr. (1924–1991) wrote the first computer dictionary in 1963. Sippl attended Corona del Mar High School in Corona Del Mar, California. For college, he attended UC Irvine where he was pre med for two years, and then transferred to UC Berkeley. There, he studied biochemistry, Immunology and Computer Science.

Career Sippl is the founder of Informix Corporation, Needing more money, Sippl sold 10% of Relational Database Systems, Inc. to his then future wife for $20,000. He received $184,600 of VC angel funding. Attending a Spring Joint Computer Conference in Atlantic City, he joined a computer manufacturer's tent where he helped to promote their product by using his new database system on their hardware. He sold a copy for $5000. The name Relational Database Systems, Inc. was changed to Informix Corporation.

Informix pioneered relational databases, 4GL application development tools, and OLTP database technology. In 1986, Sippl brought Informix public, with $20 million revenue per year. Informix is now a part of IBM after peaking at a $4,000,000,000 market cap. He was CEO for ten years.

He was the cofounder and chairman of the Vantive Corporation. Vantive was a leader in CRM. When brought public, it was acquired by PeopleSoft/Oracle. Vantive peaked at a $1,000,000,000 market cap.

He also founded Visigenic in 1993, the first application server with the notion of sharing business logic. It was the beginning of three tier architecture and helped pioneer distributed object computing and the concept of the application server based on CORBA. for successfully bringing three Silicon Valley companies public.

He founded Elastic Intelligence in 1996, to improve connection to SaaS-based data. The company's main product is the Connection Cloud, an SQL-based Platform as a Service for SaaS data.

Investing Sippl is a founding partner in Sippl MacDonald Ventures. He has invested in such companies as Illustra, Broadvision, SupportSoft and Red Pepper. He has been on over twelve boards of for-profit corporations, public and private. The public companies include Informix, Vantive, SupportSoft, and Interwoven, as well as having represented the software industry on the X/OPEN Board of Directors. He and his wife Liz have raised three children, and enjoy an active, outdoorsy life. Sippl also writes poetry. Sippl is also an amateur poker player. In 2015, he finished second in the $100,000 super high roller at the PCA in the Bahamas, winning more than $1.3 million. His total career tournament earnings from poker tournaments is over $3.8 million.