Franz Inc. was founded in early 1984 as a vehicle to produce and sell Macsyma. While that never developed into a business, Franz Inc. did sell Franz Lisp while working on their own Common Lisp implementation. Franz Lisp died out in the 80s as Common Lisp became more popular. Today, they sell Allegro Common Lisp, which is a direct descendant of the Common Lisp they developed in the mid-80s, and a series of products like AllegroCache built on it. In late 2004, Franz began a development program focused on delivering scalable RDF database technologies for the Semantic Web, also known as Web 3.0. The product, AllegroGraph, is built on many of the highly optimized technologies found in Allegro CL and AllegroCache and was a natural extension for Franz's technology stack. The release of AllegroGraph 2.2 in August 2007 has propelled Franz to a leading role as supplier of commercial, persistent and scalable RDF Graph Database products. In addition to AllegroGraph's ability to process billions of RDF triples, AllegroGraph also supports SPARQL, Full Text Search, RDFS++, and Prolog reasoning from Java or LISP applications.
