Lonne Jaffe, CEO, Syncsort

Syncsort, Inc., one of the most durable independent software vendors, has acquired U.K.-based William Data Systems as part of its campaign to help enterprise mainframe users leverage the power of modern Big Data technologies to make more efficient use of their big machines.

William Data makes network monitoring and security software products for the IBM z/OS platform. Its technology will be integrated with Syncsort’s Ironstream operational intelligence platform to enable mainframe users to mine data in order to improve performance and beef up security. Introduced last fall, Ironstream sucks operational data out of mainframes for loading into Splunk, Inc.‘s namesake platform for log analysis.

Ironstream is already the most successful product launch in Syncsort’s history, said Syncsort CEO Lonne Jaffe. “There is an insatiable customer appetite for moving data from the mainframe to Splunk,” he told SiliconANGLE. “Williams lights up the market for networking data.”

Syncsort, which was founded in 1968 when mainframes ruled the earth, now generates most of its business by helping customers combine big iron with low-cost open-source analytics platforms. By some estimates, mainframes still process 80% of transactional data in corporations.

Platforms like in Hadoop have been godsends for mainframe shops, where CPU cycles are precious and software licenses are expensive. Many IT organizations are moving functions like batch pre-processing and extract/transform/load (ETL) to cheap open-source platforms instead of taxing the big iron. That lowers software costs on the mainframe, where legacy licenses for some programs can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Companies may spend $150,000 per terabyte on a legacy data warehouse, but they can move to our platform and cut costs to $1,000 per terabyte,” Jaffe said.  “As preprocessing moves to Hadoop, a lot of the processing will move out of the data warehouse.”

Jaffe said Syncsort’s model is to “take $10 from the legacy vendor, give nine dollars to the user and keep one dollar for ourselves.”

Moving data from mainframes is complicated by the proprietary formats many legacy architectures use for log data. The primary uses of mainframe network data are for security, operations management and application performance management. Williams Data’s tools make it possible for IT organizations to identify bottlenecks that are slowing down application performance and get more oomph from their MIPS.

Among some Syncsort’s other products in this area are the MFX sort engine, the ZPSaver suite, which offloads CPU intensive tasks to specialty IBM System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) engines and DL/2, which allows customers to migrate data from IBM IMS to DB2/z without changing existing applications.

Watch Jaffe Lonne on theCUBE with John Furrier and Jeff Kelly at Hadoop Summit 2014.