I looked at my local newspaper paper on Saturday. It’s called the Austin American Statesman – strange name for a newspaper, but it’s not as bad as the New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, which is a record-breaking-strange-name for a newspaper, given that a picayune was once a Spanish coin that got its name from the French “picaioun” which means “small coin” and hence implies “worth about a nickel” or “trivial”. However, I digress.

The Business Section of the Austin American Statesman gave a list of local Austin companies, most of whose share values have been pummeled in the recent Wall Street collapse. It printed a table that gave the drop in stock values since August 11th, since when the Dow Jones Index has lost 28.8% of its value (it has lost 40% since its high of last year.) The crash has been cruel to Dell, knocking 54.3% from its stock value, and less than kind to Vignette, which has seen its stock fall by 39.8%. But in amongst the wreckage, I notice that Pervasive Software has shed no more than 1.9% of its value since August 11th – and it’s only about 18% off it’s high for the year.

Why is this?

There can always be special circumstances that surround the trading of stock. The simple reality of the market is that when sellers outnumber buyers the price falls, and right now sellers outnumber buyers for almost all stock. But no matter how far the indexes fall, if no-one is interested in selling a particular stock the price will stay roughly where it is. So I checked the market figures on the volumes of Pervasive stock changing hands and discovered that there’s nothing artificial about the stability of Pervasive’s stock price.

This suggests the alternative conclusion that stock-holders have decided that Pervasive may well be a stock worth holding in these recessionary times. It’s beyond my remit to comment on such things, but I will say this – the technology picture looks very good.

I attended the Pervasive user conference the week-before-last and I was surprised by the number of innovations that the company was suddenly introducing. I say “suddenly” simply because Pervasive’s highly regarded  “Data Junction” product set has been gradually evolving over many years and it is, imho, the best value for money offering in the ETL market (where – just in case you didn’t know – ETL, stands for Extract, Transform and Load, referring to the process of “taking data from one place and preparing it for use in another” via a process of cleaning, transforming, merging, subsetting and delivering.)

The heart of what Pervasive is doing is visible in the illustration below:

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