Syncsort is acquiring Circle Computer Group, a software maker that allows organizations to make data securely available for analytics on platforms such as Apache Hadoop. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The mainframe is that dinosaur of the prehistoric age of IT. But unlike the pterodactyl, mainframes will continue to have a hulking presence as long as corporations use them to store all their data. Circle Computer Group has developed a process for removing the data from these big-iron infrastructures and into more accessible database environments such as those from IBM.
Syncsort is one of those companies that feeds off these old, closet-sized machines with its technology for making a mainframe’s data accessible. Its competitors are legacy technology companies such as Informatica that made their fortune on extracting data and then processing it for analysis. The company maintains that its differentiation is in analyzing mainframe data using Hadoop, the de facto method in the enterprise for setting up data to be analyzed across distributed infrastructures. Syncsort opens the mainframe environment a bit more for analysis, giving companies greater ability to analyze data that has traditionally been unavailable.
Mainframes will never go away. But in this age of data, these old systems have to be accessed as much as the rest of the corporate infrastructure. To reach that data requires complex data-integration capabilities, a booming market that is emerging as more data is sought to do predictive analytics. Data integration startups include companies such as Mulesoft that are developing new methods for integrating data from on-premise environments and cloud services so it can be analyzed for further use.
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