Syncsort has completed the acquisition of UK-based Circle Computer Group, signaling the start of its acquisition-based and organic growth strategy announced earlier this year by its CEO Lonne Jaffe. According to Syncsort, the purchase of Circle is significant because it provides a portfolio of software products that allow organizations to make mainframe data securely available for new enterprise-wide big data initiatives without requiring any changes to existing applications, reducing software costs in the process.
Commenting on the Circle acquisition, Lonne Jaffe, Syncsort’s CEO, said, “We’re looking to acquire fast-growing companies with extraordinary talent and highly differentiated software that will advance our strategy and easily snap into our existing technology.” Circle’s flagship product, DL/2, provides a software engine that enables the rapid, transparent migration of applications accessing large quantities of data from the IBM Information Management System (IMS) to DB2 on z/OS, without requiring any application changes, says Syncsort. This mission-critical mainframe data can be made securely available to big data platforms such as Apache Hadoop by using Syncsort’s DMX-h product line. Circle also provides similar capabilities for moving IBM Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM) data.
Syncsort also announced separately the availability of MFX ZPCopy, a new software product that can offload mainframe copy processing to zIIP engines, and can be licensed separately as an add-on to Syncsort MFX. “Syncsort MFX runs on nearly 50% of mainframes today, so it is a very big market. The benefits of ZPCopy are that it allows customers to achieve significant operational savings and also run much faster,” said Jorge Lopez, director of product marketing at Syncsort, in an interview.
Syncsort expects its big data technology partnerships to also benefit from its acquisition of Circle. Cloudera and Syncsort recently announced a technology partnership focused on enabling enterprises to leverage mainframe data in Hadoop. Earlier in September, Syncsort also announced a new partnership with Tableau Software.
For more information, visit www.syncsort.com. For more information visit www.circle-group.com.