Here’s a brief recap of the Syncsort story, from our founding legacy as the world’s most popular and widely used mainframe sorting solution to today’s
Extreme Data Performance solutions
that are transforming data into business results.
Rethinking the economics of data since 1968
In the early days of mainframe computing, systems required huge monetary investments, specialized expertise to operate and a large amount of time to perform even the simplest functions. In 1968, seven recent graduates of New York University and Columbia University forged a partnership to address these computing challenges. They were determined to develop a software solution that increased mainframe performance while reducing operational costs.
With Whitlow Computer Systems as their original company name, the seven partners spent years perfecting a series of algorithms that streamlined mainframe sorting, used less resources, adapted to specific environmental variables and scaled to meet the demands of growing data volumes. In time, the team at Whitlow developed software that vastly outperformed all other sorting solutions and earned their first patents. In late 1971, these patented algorithms became the basis of the first version of their solution. They called it “SyncSort.”
Syncsort’s mainframe evolution and revolution
Throughout the 1970s, Whitlow continued development of SyncSort to meet the growing needs of mainframe users. The company extended functionality to DOS, as well as CMS, and began adding hundreds of dynamic optimization algorithms. Meanwhile they successfully marketed SyncSort in competition with IBM’s SM-023 free sort product and captured over 50% of the North American mainframe market. Whitlow’s mainframe sorting solution was so successful, so quickly, that the company established offices in France, Germany, England and the Netherlands. In 1981, the company formally changed its name to Syncsort Incorporated.
During the 1980s and 90s, Syncsort Incorporated steadily grew and enjoyed profitability every fiscal quarter. Syncsort listened to its growing customer base and began to offer training classes that helped make sophisticated SyncSort functions more accessible. They continued to add sort, join and aggregate algorithms to the SyncSort library, earning several more patents, and provided customers with a more flexible, more robust solution. Responding to changing system environments, the company released versions of SyncSort for Windows, Linux and UNIX.
The birth of Extreme Data Integration and Extreme Data Protection
As the 20th Century drew to a close, and at the very dawn of Big Data, Syncsort recognized the extraordinary value in new forms of enterprise data, as well as the burden exploding data volumes would have on Syncsort's customers. Leveraging its experience in increasing mainframe performance – and proactively collaborating with customers to find solutions to these rising challenges – Syncsort expanded its capabilities to include data protection and data integration.
In 1997, Syncsort introduced its
BEX data protection solution.
Syncsort’s solution was the first data protection solution with three-tiered architecture, providing broad platform support to local and remote servers on a single pane-of-glass interface. Along with extremely fast backup and recovery operations, the three-tiered architecture provides extreme ease of use, unparalleled performance and exceptional utilization of advanced technologies. Eventually, these advanced technologies would include bare metal recovery, instant availability, source-side data reduction, Exchange server restore, as well as virtual machine backup, restore and cloning.
To meet modern demands for dynamic management of growing data volumes, Syncsort next released its
DMExpress data integration solution in 2004.
This technology evolved from the SyncSort performance engine to accommodate a broader range of data sources and targets, a wider array of reporting options, metadata management and a more usable job management console at the fastest possible speeds.
Syncsort technology extracts, transforms, cleanses and loads data so fast that DMExpress earned the ETL World Record in 2008, transferring 5.4TB of raw data into a Vertica Analytic Database on an HP c-class BladeSystem in just 57 minutes. This feat shattered the previous World Record, held by Microsoft, which transformed 2.36TB in an hour and cost $636/GB/hr. The record-setting Syncsort-Vertica-HP solution cost $46/GB/hr and validated Syncsort’s ability to provide optimal performance and maximum return on investment.
Rethinking the economics of data for today’s most successful organizations
For thousands of organizations, with more than 15,000 deployments in 70 countries, Syncsort speeds data integration and data protection, unlocks measurable business value and transforms business-critical decision making.
Headquartered in northeast New Jersey, Syncsort has international subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, with support centers across the United States and the Netherlands. An international network of
partners,
resellers and distributors includes Syncsort products as integral components of their IT solutions.