Contact: John Abbott
Syncsort acquires mainframe networking monitoring and security tools provider William Data Systems in an effort to recast the mainframe for modern workloads and applications. Syncsort was formed in the mid-1960s to improve the native sort utility that came with early-generation IBM mainframes. But these days, Syncsort is more likely to be talking about modern apps like Hadoop and Splunk.
Syncsort says the networking and security data collected by WDS’s Zen product suite will complement its ‘Big Iron to Big Data’ strategy by linking high-volume transactional data from the mainframe to big data analytical platforms, including Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud. The Zen tools, which span monitoring, alerting, tracing, vulnerability tracking, encryption and authentication, will be integrated into the recently launched Syncsort Ironstream product, which provides real-time mainframe operational intelligence from within Splunk Enterprise. It will also be used in conjunction with Syncsort’s Hadoop-based data-integration tools that connect the mainframe to Apache Spark, Tableau, Amazon Redshift, QlikView and other modern analytical platforms.
Syncsort hired a new management team in 2013, led by CEO Lonne Jaffe, who in previous corporate strategy roles at CA Technologies and IBM had been heavily involved in M&A. The company’s first buy was Circle Computer Group in September 2013, adding technology for moving large amounts of data between mainframe databases and more modern platforms, without changes to the applications.
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