UPDATED 11:38 EDT / NOVEMBER 19 2013

NEWS

Syncsort’s Ironcluster : data transformation that saves lots of money | #reinvent

For one of the last segments of Day 3 of AWS re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas, Dave Vellante, joined by Jeff Kelly, welcomed Lonne Jaffe, the CEO of Syncsort, one of the oldest companies in the IT business. theCUBE interview focused on the company’s business model and recent activity, as well as on recent acquisitions and recent product launches.

Jaffe was happy to present a bit of the company’s history: “Syncsort is one of the first software companies ever, founded in 1968. For the first couple decades the business was high performance data processing software in the main frame and sorting programs. Over time, the company evolved to build a whole array of next-generation technologies that connect the legacy systems, process data and then load it into new systems.”

Before joining Syncsort in 2013, Lonne Jaffe was with IBM for 13 years and CA Technologies for a couple of years.

“The first thing that we wanted to do at Syncsort was take this Hadoop business that was built, this next generation Big Data technology that was selling really well and scale it out – double down on the business and grow it. We wanted to create all sorts of things like create the cloud version – which we just launched this week,” boasted Jaffe.

“The other thing that we wanted to do (the venture partners wanted to do, actually), was double down on the business – inorganically,” Jaffe went on. “They wanted to allocate their capital and they wanted to use Syncsort as an acquisition vehicle to buy other strategic software companies that we could give a lot of lift to. We did the first one a couple of weeks ago with a company called Circle, based in the UK.”

Why Syncsort acquired Circle

 

Vellante wanted to know more about Circle and why it sparked such an interest.

“The technology of Circle takes mainframe data stored in the IMS or VSAM and moves it to a more strategic location DB2Z, and makes it more accessible to our Hadoop product,” explained Jaffe.

Why is this important? As Lonne Jaffe put it, the early adopters of Hadoop, meaning the consumer Internet companies of Silicon Valley such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Twitter, didn’t have any mainframes or legacy systems so this wasn’t a challenge for them. But for the grown-up companies who are using Hadoop, “what good is your next-generation Big Data cluster if you can access your actual data?” pondered Jaffe. “Seventy to 80 percent of corporate data is still stored in the mainframe, so this allows them to get access that mainframe data and helps them save a lot of money.”

Launching Ironcluster

 

“This week we launched Syncsort Ironcluster, the first data integration product, that runs nativelly on Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR). Without installing any servers or software, that allows you to spin up a Hadoop cluster in the cloud and start siphoning off your expensive workload that you were previously running in a legacy data warehouse, or legacy ETL tool. You can instead save huge amounts of money and redo those processes with Hadoop in the cloud, without building anything.

The Hadoop cluster is getting better and better everyday, and you can use it to pre-process the data, and load it back into whatever system you were loading into before, OR you can load it into something like Amazon Redshift, which gives you the opportunity to do a whole array of next-generation cloud things,” stated Jaffe.

Saving all that money allows you to hire a data scientist or experiment with new analytics. As Kelly noticed, “it’s a great proposition for the enterprise.”

“It’s so much easier to sell something when it does something useful and saves money, as opposed to just saves money or just does something useful,” clarified Jaffe.

The pitfalls of M&A

 

“My big focus from an acquisition perspective (and this is particularly important in the world of open source), is finding things that are sustainably high-value. It’s very easy to have a piece of technology in the world of Hadoop, where tomorrow a company like Facebook open sources a project that does the same thing that the product you’re trying to sell. So you need to find things that are incredibly challenging, sustainably high-value, that you can give a lot of lift to,” advised Jaffe.


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