As Splunk Inc.’s share of the information technology analytics market continues to grow, its partners are finding opportunities for adding value to the Splunk platform and their mutual customers. Syncsort Inc., a company that extends Splunk’s data analytics and security platform into mainframe environments, just unveiled a new product called Transaction Tracing that adds more visibility into transactional workloads in mainframes.

“What we’ve done with Transaction Tracing is created an ability for Splunk customers to be able to surface all of that data collated together and get a unified view of both how the service is behaving, the performance characteristics its delivering to the customers that are utilizing the service and then the impact that it’s having on the mainframe,” said Josh Rogers (pictured), chief executive officer of Syncsort.

Rogers spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Spunk’s .conf2017 event in Washington, D.C. They discussed Syncsort’s value proposition in helping mainframe customers get onto the Splunk platforms. (* Disclosure below.)

Mainframe modernization

Even with the growth of cloud computing across the industry, legacy mainframe compute volumes are actually continuing to rise, according to Rogers. He explained that a key driver in the growth comes from the transactional workloads generated by mobile devices back to the mainframe. The increase in touchpoints is a great opportunity for analytics but requires some consideration from a cost and data management perspective, he added.

“The trick is I’ve got to get that data into a repository and into an analytic environment that can handle that data, and that’s where I think Splunk creates such an interesting opportunity,” Rogers said. “And what we’re trying to do is add value to that and make it easier for customers to leverage all of their data,” Rogers said.

These mainframe modernizations are what Rogers calls part of the “Big Iron to Big Data” challenge that his company is helping customers to solve. This modernization process is especially relevant among government entities that still run on large mainframe environments, which is why Syncsort signed a distribution agreement with Carahsoft Technology Corp. — a software re-seller specializing in government agencies — to get its latest Transaction Tracing product to market.   

“Giving ourselves an easy route to market for these customers is a great opportunity for us. It’s also a good opportunity for Splunk’s customers who are in the government because they can go and buy additional capabilities that are relevant to their environment through the same partners that have working with Splunk,” Rogers said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk .conf2017. (* Disclosure: Syncsort Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Syncsort nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE