Pervasive Software offers software and services for big data application development, including a cloud platform, a database solution and even documentation brokerage. New this week is news that the firm received an unsolicited buyout offer from Actian, and bluntly turned it down.

Actian however is pretty determined to acquire Pervasive, so they did the next best thing they could think of and publicized this exchange in hopes of getting a different response from the publicly traded firm’s investors. Actian offered $8.5 a share or a total of about $139 million in cash for Pervasive, a 30 percent premium over the stock’s Friday closing price of $6.55. PVSW.O is currently trading at $7.8.

WSJ dug up a few extra details:

“In a letter to Pervasive Chief Executive John Farr, Actian CEO Steve Shine noted that the offer price is at the highest closing price reached by Pervasive’s common shares during the last 10 years. Pervasive had about 16.2 million shares outstanding as of June 30.

Shine was also quoted as saying that Pervasive would be “an excellent strategic fit for Actian.” His firm offers a cloud development platform for the creation of light-weight Action Apps – business applications built on top of Vectorwise, the company’s real-time analytics engine. Users of the technology include Oxford University.

It’s easy to see why the software vendor sees Pervasive as a prime acquisition target, but unfortunately for Actian it hasn’t secured this high-value asset just yet. What this update helps validate is that there’s a lot of money at stake over big data – Realtime founding CEO André Parreira could say the same thing.

Realtime raised a total of $100 million in funding to date for a set of tools that enable the creation of applications that can display and use data much faster than before.