What are the oldest technology companies still operating today? Before Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Oracle and Microsoft there was IBM, AT&T and Hewlett-Packard. General Electric goes all the way back to Thomas Edison in 1892. These are all household names to be sure, but there is one company on the “half a century and more” list that might catch some people by surprise: Syncsort Inc.

Founded in 1968 (the same year as Intel), Syncsort was created to provide a sorting utility for mainframe computers. One of its first tasks was to design an airline reservations system for Control Data, and the business took off rapidly from there, gaining a foothold in the European market where the company became one of the first to sell independent software in that part of the world.

What has carried Syncsort into the next half century is the mainframe, “Big Iron” technology that many experts believed would go the way of the dinosaur and video rental stores. Many of the world’s largest companies and governments still rely on mainframes for transactional processing (IBM’s z13 can process 2.5 billion transactions per day), and the company found its niche with data integration technology.

“We believe to get full value out of the investments in next-generation technologies, it would be helpful if you had your full data assets available. We can help you do that in a number of ways that you won’t be able to find anywhere else,” said Josh Rogers (pictured), chief executive officer of Syncsort.

Rogers stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, for two separate interviews. He spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier (@furrier) during the BigData NYC event in New York City, as well as with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21) at Splunk.conf 2017 in Washington, D.C. They discussed Syncsort’s relationship with Splunk, meeting operational challenges for mainframes, the opportunity for growth in the public sector, acquisitions and Syncsort’s business expansion over the past two years. (* Disclosures below.)

This week theCUBE features Josh Rogers as our Guest of the Week.

Watch Rogers’ complete video interview at BigData NYC below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData NYC 2017. (* Disclosure: Syncsort Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Syncsort nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Applying mainframe data to Splunk models

Syncsort’s value proposition is in meeting the “Big Iron to Big Data” challenge, and the company’s partnership with Splunk offers a prime example of this in action. Syncsort taps into the vast amount of mainframe-generated information and applies it to Splunk data models that are based on enterprise security and information technology services. Customers can enhance both areas using analytics made richer by Syncsort’s process.

“What we’ve done is taken the very large amount of machine mainframe data that gets produced … and we’ve mapped it into those two data models that Splunk has created,” Rogers explained. “Nobody else has done that.”

The company is also being helped by the mobile revolution. The ability to manage banking accounts via smartphone apps has created many more interaction points than before. These create new operational challenges in mainframe environments and put pressure on enterprises to find more efficiency in transaction processing.

A basic mobile banking example helps to emphasize this point. Rogers described how he was hiking in Colorado one day and needed to transfer funds between accounts. He made the transaction using his smartphone, and then later in the day, while roaming around a golf course, initiated a separate wire transaction. One person … multiple transactions … all going through various mainframe environments in the space of hours.

“I probably interact with my bank a lot more than I did 10 years ago,” Rogers said. “What we want to do is help customers run that system as efficiently as possible.”

Syncsort is also targeting a prime opportunity for additional growth in the public sector. The federal government is one of the largest users of mainframe technology today, with large agencies such as the Veterans Affairs Department, Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service still relying on Big Iron, based on a recent report.

Partnerships and investments

The company is seeking to expand its government customer base through a recently announced partnership with Carahsoft Technology Corp. Syncsort signed a distribution agreement to market its Ironstream Transaction Tracing and mainframe machine data technology in the public sector through Carahsoft’s network of resellers and Splunk Enterprise.

This opportunity could extend well beyond the federal government. Splunk has built a sizable business in the public sector, with a presence in 40 out of 50 states, in addition to local agencies. A key driver of this could be the roll out of smart city technologies, which depend heavily on the kind of analytics and data integration capabilities that Syncsort provides.

“That is going to allow government customers to take more advantage of Ironstream and Transaction Tracing,” said Rogers, who described the recent Carahsoft partnership. “The federal government is an enormous market opportunity, and it’s also a big mainframe environment.”

Over the past 10 years, Syncsort has become a hot commodity in the private equity world. In 2008, a number of venture groups, including Bessemer Venture Partners and The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., purchased a majority stake in the firm. After spinning off its data protection business (which became Catalogic Software Inc.) in 2013, the company was acquired by Clearlake Capital Group LP two years later. And this past July, the company was sold again, this time to Centerbridge Partners LP, which combined Syncsort with Vision Solutions Inc., a software as a service firm with a specialty in real-time data replication.

The company has also grown through its own acquisition strategy, buying Trillium Software Inc., a data quality company, late last year and then acquiring Metron Technology, Ltd, a software forecasting firm for complex systems, right after that. The net result of this is that Syncsort has tripled revenue and doubled headcount all in the past 24 months, according to Rogers.

“There’s certainly an opportunity to create long-term sustained value in a private equity-backed model. We think there’s an opportunity to build a big business,” Rogers said. After 50 years of survival in the technology jungle on a mainframe model that just won’t quit, he just might be right.

Watch Rogers’ complete video interview at Splunk .conf2017 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