Roger Sippl

Roger J. Sippl was born on 22 February 1955 and grew up in Wausau, Wisconsin, the sixth of seven children. His father, Charles J. Sippl Jr. (1924 to 1991), wrote the first computer dictionary in 1963. Sippl attended Corona del Mar High School in California.

He began college as a pre medical student at UC Irvine before transferring to UC Berkeley, where he studied biochemistry, immunology and computer science and graduated in 1977. While at Berkeley he was diagnosed with stage IIIB Hodgkin's lymphoma and was treated with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. According to Phil Hellmuth, doctors told him at 19 that he had no chance of living past 21. He remained free of the disease for the rest of his life.

While still a student Sippl worked full time as a programmer for Bechtel. He then joined Cromemco, working for Harry Garland and Roger Melen, and designed a small relational database there. In 1980 he left to found Relational Database Systems, Inc., with Cromemco licensing his designs in return for the first OEM deal. He later said he had not known of Edgar Codd's relational theory when he began designing the product's query language. Short of capital, he sold 10 percent of the company to his future wife for 20,000 dollars and raised a small angel round.

The company was renamed Informix and became a pioneer of relational databases, 4GL development tools and OLTP technology on Unix. Sippl took it public in 1986 and was chief executive for about ten years. Its database business was sold to IBM in 2001 and continues as IBM Informix.

He co-founded Vantive, a leading customer relationship management company, and chaired it from 1990 to 1998; it was later acquired by PeopleSoft. In 1993 he founded Visigenic, an early application server company based on CORBA that helped pioneer three tier and distributed object computing, and which Borland acquired. Bringing three companies to public markets earned him the Golden Hat Trick Award, and in 2012 The Wall Street Journal called him a serial entrepreneur. He was a founding partner of Sippl MacDonald Ventures, investing in companies including Illustra, BroadVision and SupportSoft, sat on more than twelve boards including Informix, Vantive, SupportSoft and Interwoven, and founded Elastic Intelligence.

Sippl and his wife Liz raised three children and lived in Woodside, California. He chaired the Stanford Cancer Council for more than ten years. He wrote poetry, published in more than 30 literary journals including the medical journals JAMA Oncology and CHEST.

He was a keen amateur poker player and a regular in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles private games. At the 2015 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure he reached the final table of the 100,000 dollar Super High Roller as chip leader and finished second to Steve O'Dwyer, winning 1,344,420 dollars. In 2016 he finished third of 4,499 entrants in the World Series of Poker 1,000 dollar Seniors No Limit Hold'em Championship. He appeared on Poker Night in America and in the tenth season of High Stakes Poker in 2023, and his live tournament winnings exceeded 3.8 million dollars.

Roger Sippl's death at the age of 71 was made public on 9 November 2026 by his friend, the professional poker player Andrew Robl, who described him on X as a loving husband, father, founder and all around poker enjoyer. The cause of death was not made public.

Phil Hellmuth, who had played with him for about 20 years, called him a colorful character and a fearless businessman and said he talked about his family at every opportunity. Robl said he had never heard a bad word about him from any regular he had played with. Funeral and memorial details had not been announced at the time of the first reports.

Sippl helped bring relational databases to the Unix world at a time when few commercial users took Unix seriously, and Informix became one of the major database companies of its era. His later companies helped shape customer relationship management software and the application server model. His long survival after a grim cancer diagnosis, his work for the Stanford Cancer Council and his poetry gave him a reputation well beyond the software industry.