ActiveState Software Inc. is a Canadian software company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. It develops, sells, and supports cross-platform development tools for dynamic languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, as well as language distributions and enterprise services. ActiveState is owned by its employees and Pender Financial Group, an investment company focused on technology and healthcare sectors in British Columbiaafter briefly being a member of the Sophos group. On 2003-09-24, Sophos Plc announced the acquisition of ActiveState Corp. As part of the acquisition, ActiveState’s president Steve Munford would become a member of Sophos’s executive management team as Global VP Messaging.

On 2006-01-29, Pender Financial Group announced on that it has entered into an agreement with Sophos, Inc. to acquire ActiveState Software Inc. On 2006-02-21, ActiveState Software Inc. announced its acquisition by Pender Financial Group Corporation from Sophos, Inc. , a subsidiary of Sophos Plc. , for the purchase price of US$2,250,000.

Following the acquisition, Bart Copeland would become ActiveState Software Inc. ‘s President and CEO, and Dr. David Ascher would become ActiveState Software Inc. ‘s CTO and VP of Engineering. 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.

In October 2006, ActiveState was named one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers, as published in Maclean’s magazine, along with several other software companies. Somewhere around 2013 the licensing model for ActiveState products changed from paid support to paid commercial use. • Phenona: On 2011-06-14, ActiveState Software Inc. announced the acquisition of Phenona. • Appsecute Limited: On 2013-06-04, ActiveState Software Inc.

announced the acquisition of Appsecute. The acquisition would become ActiveState’s strategy to pair Appsecute with Stackato. ActiveState products include: ActiveState Komodo, an integrated development environment (IDE) for dynamic languages; Perl Dev Kit (PDK) and Tcl Dev Kit (TDK), productivity and deployment tools for Perl and Tcl programmers; and free and commercial language distributions, ActivePerl, ActivePython, and ActiveTcl for AIX, HP-UX, Linux, OS X, Solaris, and Windows. ActivePython is a software package consisting of the Python (programming language) implementation CPython and a set of extensions, packaged to facilitate installation. As of 2006, it ran on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX platforms.

ActivePython for Windows includes the PyWin32 extensions for programming with the Win32 API. It also includes the integrated development environment IDLE, although this requires manual setup. In February 2012, ActiveState announced 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. In December 2012, ActiveState announced the OEM integration of Stackato with HP Cloud Services, specifically the HP Cloud Application Platform as a Service. HP describes the product as “an application platform for development, deployment, and management of cloud applications using any language on any stack”.

In July 28, 2015, Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L. P. announced the acquisition of Stackato’s business from ActiveState Software Inc. .