>> Announcer: Live from Midtown Manhattan it's theCUBE. Covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. >> Welcome back everyone live here in New York City this theCUBE's coverage of our fifth annual annual event that we put on ourselves in conjunction Strata Hadoop now called Strata Data. It's theCUBE and we're covering the scene here at Hadoop World going back to 2010, eight years of Coverage. I'm John Furrier co-host of theCUBE. Usually Dave Vellante is here but he's down covering the Splunk Conference and who was there yesterday was no other than Josh Rogers my next guest the CEO of Syncsort, you were with Dave Vellante yesterday and live on theCUBE in Washington, DC for the Splunk .conf kind of a Big Data Conference but it's a proprietary, branded event for themselves. This is a more industry even here at Big Data NYC that we put on. Welcome back glad you flew up on the on the Concord, the private jet. >> Early morning but it was was fine. >> No good to see you a CEO of Syncsort, you guys have been busy. For the folks watching in theCUBE community know that you've been on many times. The folks that are learning more about theCUBE every day, you guys had an interesting transformations as a company, take a minute to talk about where you've come from and where you are today. Certainly a ton of corporate development activity in your end it, as you guys are seeing the opportunities, you're moving on them. Take a minute to explain. >> So, you know it's been a great journey so far and there's a lot more work to do, but you know Syncsort is one of the first software companies, right. Founded in the late 60's today has a unparalleled franchise in the mainframe space. But over the last 10 years or so we branched out into open systems and delivered high performance data integration solutions. About 4 years ago really started to invest in the Big Data space we had a DNA around performance and scale we felt like that would be relevant in the Big Data space. We delivered a Hadoop focused product and today we focus around that product around helping customers ingest mainframe data assets into their into Hadoop clusters along with other types data. But a specific focus there. That has lead us into understanding a bigger market space that we call Big Iron to Big Data. And what we see in the marketplace is that customers are adapting. >> Just before you get in there I love that term, Big Iron Big Data you know I love Big Iron. Used to be a term for the mainframe for the younger generation out there. But you're really talking about you guys have leveraged experience with the installed base activity that scale call it batched, molded, single threaded, whatever you want to call it. But as you got into the game of Big Data you then saw other opportunities, did I get that right? You got into the game with some Hadoop, then you realize, whoa, I can do some large scale. What was that opportunity? >> The opportunity is that you know large enterprise is absolutely investing heavily in the next generation of analytic technologies in a new stack. Hadoop is a part of that, Spark is a part of that. And they're rapidly adopting these new infrastructures to drive deeper analytics to answer bigger questions and improve their business and in multiple dimensions. The opportunity we saw was that you know the ability for those enterprises to be able to integrate this new kind of architecture with the legacy architectures. So, the old architectures that were powering key applications impede key up producers of data was a challenge, there was multiple technology challenges, there's cultural challenges. And we had this kind of expertise on both sides of the house and and we found that to be unique in the marketplace. So we put a lot of effort into understanding, defining what are the challenges in that Big Iron to Big Data space that helped customers maximize their value out of these investments in next generation architectures. And we define the problem two ways, one is our two components. One is that people are generating more and more data more and more touch points and driving more and more transactions with their customers. And that's generating increased load on the compute environments and they want to figure out how do I run that, you know if I have a mainframe how to run as efficiently as possible contain my costs maximize availability and uptime. At the same time I've got all this new data that I can start to analyze but I got to get it from the area that it's produced into this next generation system. And there's a lot of challenges there. So we started to isolate, you know, what are the specific use cases the present customers challenge and deliver very different IT solutions. Overarching kind of messages around positioning is around solving the Big Iron to Big Data challenge. >> You guys had done some acquisitions and been successful, I want to talk a little bit about the ones that you like right now that happened the past year or two years. I think you've done five in the past two years. A couple key notable ones that set you up kind of give you pole position for some of these big markets, and then after we talk then I want to talk about your ecosystem opportunity. But some of the acquisitions and what's working for you? What's been the big deals? >> So the larger the larger we did in 2016 was a company called Trillium, leader in the data quality space. Long time leader in the data quality space and the opportunity we saw with Trillium was to complement our data movement integration capabilities. A natural complement, but to focus very specifically on how to drive value in this next generation architecture. Particularly in things like Hadoop. what I'd like to be able to do is apply best in class data quality routines directly in that environment. And so we, from our experience in delivering these Big Data solutions in the past, we knew that we could take a lot of technology and create really powerful solutions that were that leverage the native kind of capabilities of Hadoop but had it on a layer of you've proven technology for best in class day quality. Probably the biggest news of the last few weeks has been that we were acquired by a new private equity partner called Centerbridge Partners. In that acquisition actually acquired Syncsort and they acquired a company called Vision Solutions. And we've combined those organizations. >> John: When did that happen? >> The deal was announced July, early July and it closed in the middle of August. And vision solutions is a really interesting company. They're the leader in high availability for the IBM i market. IBM i was originally called AS/400 it's had a couple of different names and a dominant kind of market position. What we liked about that business was A. That market position four thousand customers generally large enterprise. And also you know market leading capability around data replication in real time. >> And we saw IBM. >> Migration data, disaster recovery kind of thing? >> It's DR it's high availability, it's migrations, it's also changed data capture actually. And leveraging all common technology elements there. But it also represents a market leading franchise in IBM i which is in many ways very similar to the mainframe. Run optimized for transactional systems, hard to kind of get at. >> Sounds like you're reconstructing the mainframe in the cloud. >> It's not so much that, it's the recognition that those compute systems still run the world. They still run all the transactions. >> Well, some say the cloud is a software mainframe. >> I think over time you'll see that, we don't see that our business today. There is a cloud aspect our business it's not to move this transactional applications running on those platforms into the cloud yet. Although I suspect that happens at some point. But our point, our interest was more these are the systems that are producing the world's data. And it's hard to to get. >> There are big, big power sources for data, they're not going anywhere. So we've got the expertise to source that data into these next generation systems. And that's a tricky problem for a lot of customers, and and not something. >> That a problem they have. And you guys basically cornered the market on that. >> So think about Big Iron and Big Data as these two components, being able to source data and make a productive using these next generation analytics systems, and also be able to run those existing systems as you know efficiently as possible. >> All right, so how do you talk to customers and I've asked this question before so I just ask again, oh, Syncsort now you got vision you guys are just a bunch of old mainframe guys. What do you know about cloud native? A lot of the hipsters and the young guns out there might not know about some of the things you're doing on the cutting edge, because even though you have the power base of these old big systems, we're just throwing off massive amounts of data that aren't going anywhere. You still are integrated into some cutting edge. Talk about that, that narrative, and how you. >> So I mean the folks that we target. >> I used cloud only as an example. Shiny, cool, new toys. >> Organizations we target and our customers and prospects, and generally we we serve large enterprise. You know large complex global enterprises. They are making significant investments in Hadoop and Splunk and these next generation environments. We approach them and say we believe to get full value out of your investments in these next generation technologies, it would be helpful if you had your most critical data assets available. And that's hard, and we can help you do that. And we can help you do that in a number of ways that you won't be able to find anywhere else. That includes features in our products, it includes experts on the ground. And what we're seeing is there's a huge demand because, you know, Hadoop is really kind of you can see it in the Cloudera and Hortonworks results and the scale of revenue. This is a you know a real foundational component data management this point. Enterprises are embracing it. If they can't solve that integration challenge between the systems that produce all the data and, you know, where they want to analyze the data There's a there's a big value gap. And we think we're uniquely positioned to be able to do that, one because we've got the technical expertise, two, they're all our customers at this point, we have six thousand customers. >> You guys have executed very well. I just got to say you guys are just slowly taking territory down you and you got a great strategy, get into a business, you don't overplay your hand or get over your skis, whatever you want to call it. And you figure it out and see if was a fit. If it is, grab it, if not, you move on. So also you guys have relationships so we're talking about your ecosystem. What is your ecosystem and what is your partner strategy? >> I'll talk a little bit about the overall strategy and I'll talk about how partners fit into that. Our strategy is to identify specific use cases that are common and challenging in our customer set, that fall within this Big Iron to Big Data umbrella. It's then to deliver a solution that is highly differentiated. Now, the third piece of that is to partner very closely with you know the emerging platform vendors in the in the Big Data space. And the reason for that is we're solving an integration challenge for them. Like Cloudera, like Hortonworks, like Splunk. We launched a relationship with Calibra in the middle the year. We just announced our relationship. >> Yeah, for them the benefits of them is they don't do the heavy lifting you've got that covered. >> We can we can solve a lot of pain points they have getting their platforms setup. >> That's hard to replicate on their end, it's not like they're going to go build it. >> Cloudera and Hortonworks, they don't have mainframe skills. They don't understand how to go access >> Classic partnering example. >> But that the other pieces is we do real engineering work with these partnerships. So we build, we write code to integrate and add value to platforms. >> It's not a Barney deal, it's not an optical deal. >> Absolutely. >> Any jazz is critical in the VM world of some of the deals he's been done in the industry referring to his deal, that's seems to be back in vogue thank God, that people going to say they're going to do a deal and they back it with actually following through. What about other partnerships, how else, how you looking at partnering? So, pretty much, where it fits in your business, are people coming to you, are you going to them? >> We certainly have people coming to us. The the key thing, the number one driver is customers. You know, as we understand use cases, as customers introduce us to new challenges that they are facing, we will not just look at how do we solve it, but and what are the other platforms that we're integrating with, and if we believe we can add unique value to that partner we'll approach that partner. >> Let's talk customers, give me some customer use cases that you're working on right now, that you think are notable worth highlighting. >> Sure so we do a lot in the in the financial services space. You know we have a number of customers >> Where there's mainframes. >> Where there's a lot of mainframes, but it's not just in financial services. Here's an interesting one, was insurance company and they were looking at how to transition their mainframe archive strategy. So they have regulations around how long they have to keep data, they had been using traditional mainframe archive technology, very expensive on annual basis and also unflexible. They didn't have access to. >> And performance too. At the end of the day don't forget performance >> They want performance, this was more of an archive use case and what they really wanted was an ability both access the data and also lower the cost of storing the data for the required time from a regulation perspective. And so they made the decision that they wanted to store it in the cloud, they want to store it in S3. There's a complicated data movement there, there's a complicated data translation process there and you need to understand the mainframe and you need to understand AWS and S3 and all those components, and we had all those pieces and all that expertise and were able to solve that. So we're doing that with a few different customers now. But that's just an example of, you know, there's a great ROI, there's a lot more business flexibility then there's a modernization aspect to it that's very attractive. >> Well, great to hear from you today. I'm glad you made it up here, again you were in DC yesterday thanks for coming in, checking out to shows you're certainly pounding the pavement as they say in New York, to quote New Yorker phrase. What's new for you guys, what's coming out? More acquisitions happening? what's the outlook for Syncsort? >> So were were always active on the M&A front. We certainly have a pipeline of activities and there's a lot of different you know interesting spaces, adjacencies that we're exploring right now. There's nothing that I can really talk about there >> Can you talk about the categories you're looking at? >> Sure you know, things around metadata management, things around real-time data movement, cloud opportunities. There's there's some interesting opportunities in the artificial intelligence, machine learning space. Those are all >> Deep learning. >> Deep learning, those are all interesting spaces for us to think about. Security and other space is interesting. So we're pretty active in a lot of adjacencies >> Classic adjacent markets that you're looking at. So you take one step at a time, slow. >> But then we try to innovate on, you know, after the catch, so we did three announcements this week. Transaction tracing for Ironstream and a kind of refresh of data quality for Hadoop approach. So we'll continue to innovate on the organic setup as well. >> Final question the whole private equity thing. So that's done, so they put a big bag of money in there and brought the two companies together. Is there structural changes, management changes, you're the Syncsort CEO is there a new co name? >> The combined companies will operate under the Syncsort name, I'll serve as the CEO. >> Syncsort is the remaining name and you guys now have another company under it. >> Yes, that's right. >> And cash they put in, probably a boatload of cash for corporate development. >> The announcement the announced deal value was $1.2 billion a little over $1.2 billion. >> So you get a checkbook and looking to buy companies? >> We are we're going to continue, as I said yesterday, to Dave, you know I like to believe that we proved the hypothesis were in about the second inning. Can't wait to keep playing the game. >> It's interesting just, real quick while I got you in here, we got a break coming up for the guys. Private equity move is a good move in this transitional markets, you and I have talked about this in the past off-camera. It's a great thing to do, is take, if you're public and you're not really knocking it out of the park. Kill the 90 day shot clock, go private, there seems to be a lot of movement there. Retool and then re-emerge stronger. >> We've never been public, but I will say, the Centerbridge team has been terrific. A lot of resources there and certainly we do talk we're still very quarterly focused, but I think we've got a great partner and look forward to continue. >> The waves are coming, the big waves are coming so get your big surfboard out, we say in California. Josh, thanks for spending the time. Josh Rogers, CEO Syncsort here on theCUBE. More live coverage in New York after this break. Stay with us for our day two of three days of coverage of Big Data NYC 2017. Our event that we hold every year here in conjunction with Hadoop World right around the corner. I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back.