Sybase Inc has sold one of the companies it acquired two years ago back to its original owners. Visual Components Inc announced this week that it had separated from Sybase and would resume its original name, operating from the same location at Overland Park, Kansas that it had when it was acquired. Thomas DeBacco, co-founder of the original company back in 1993, becomes the company’s CEO and chairman. At Sybase he was president and general manager of the division. He is joined by fellow co- founder Mark Callegari, who also stayed on at Sybase during the company’s tenure as a subsidiary. Visual Components was acquired by Sybase in January 1996 for 896,000 shares, worth around $26m (CI No 2,826), as one of a number of companies Sybase bought to enhance the value of its Powersoft Corp acquisition of 1994. The company was developing re-usable software components such as its Formula One Excel compatible spreadsheet, First Impression charting tool and VisualSpeller spell-checking modules for inclusion in larger software development tool systems, such PowerBuilder, Borland Delphi and Microsoft Visual Basic. Sybase ran the unit as an independent subsidiary, continuing to let it develop objects for non-Sybase platforms: others using components include Lotus Development Corp, Netscape Communications Corp, Corel Corp and Micrografx Inc. At the end of last year, Sybase shipped dbComplete, a set of ActiveX components for building database applications developed by Visual Components. It’s unclear why Sybase sold the unit, though it’s possible that as its biggest customer, it originally acquired the company only to help it through some hard times. Component applications have not taken off as quickly as many people predicted at the time, when Visual Components was being billed as one of a new breed of companies pioneering application objects. No financial details of the transaction were revealed, and it seems likely that Sybase still retains a financial stake in the company. Visual Components said it would concentrate on its existing ActiveX marketplace and claimed it was in a good position to become a significant force in the emerging Java component market. It recently released a Java version of Formula One.
