 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to our Boston area studio. I'm happy to welcome back to the program a multi-time guest, Josh Rogers is the CEO of Syncsort. Josh, great to see you. Great to see you, thanks for having me. All right, so Syncsort is a company that, what I would say is you guys are deep in the data ocean. You know, data is at the center of everything. When Wikibon, we've read our predictions. Everything, whether you're talking about cloud, whether you're talking about infrastructure, and of course everything's like IoT and Edge. Data is at the center of it. I want you to help start off as, there's this term, you know, it's a big iron, big data. Help explain to us what that is and what that means to both Syncsort and your customers. Sure, yeah, so we like to talk about Syncsort as the leader in big iron to big data. And it's a positioning that we've chosen for the firm because we think it represents the value proposition that we bring to our customers, but we also think it represents a collection of use cases that are really at the top of the agenda of CIOs today. And really we talk about it in two areas. The first is a recognition that large enterprises still run mission critical workloads on systems that they've built over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Those systems leverage mainframe computing, they leverage IBMI or AS 400, and they spent trillions of dollars building those systems and they still deliver core workloads that power their businesses. So mission number one is that these firms want to make sure that they optimize those environments. They run them as efficiently as possible. They can't go down. They've got the proper security kind of protocols around them and of course that situation's always changing as workloads grow and change on these environments. So first is how do I optimize these systems that while they may be mature, they are still mission critical. The second is a recognition that most of the critical data assets for our customers are created in these systems. These are the systems that execute the transactions and as a result have core information around the results of the firm, the firm's customers, et cetera. So second value proposition is how do I maximize the value of that data that gets produced in those systems which tends to be a focus on liberating it, making a copy of it and moving it into next generation analytic systems. And then you look at the technical requirements of that, it turns out that it's hard. I'm taking data from systems that were created 50 years ago and I'm integrating it with systems that were created five years ago. And so we've got a special set of expertise and solutions that allow customers to both optimize these old systems and maximize the value of data produced in those systems. Yeah, you bring up some really good points. When I've been talking the last couple of years to people about how do I really wrap my arms around my data and we're talking about a multi-cloud world and where we have pockets of information trapped, that's a challenge. So it's not just about my data center and Amazon, it's like, oh wait, I've got all these SaaS deployments. And I think it's probably, it's a blind spot that I had had as to, sure, right, you've got companies that have, let's call them legacy systems, ones that they've got a lot of investment, but these are mission critical, these are ones that it is not easy to modernize them. But if I can get access to the data and put this into these next generation systems, it sounds like you kind of free that data and allow that to be leveraged much easier. That's right, that's right. And what we try to do is focus on what are the next generation trends in data and how are they going to intersect with these kind of, these older systems. And so that started as big data, but it includes cloud and multi-cloud. It includes real time in IoT. It includes things like blockchain. We're really scanning the horizon for what are these kind of generational shifts in terms of how am I going to leverage data and how do we get really tight on the use cases that our customers are going to need to solve to integrate those new technologies with these old investments? Yeah, Josh, I'd love to hear what you're seeing from customers. So, you know, we've talked to you at some of the big data shows. I know we spoke to you at the Splunk shows. I felt like we, as an industry, got bogged down in some of the tools for a couple of years. While Wikibon, we did, you know, the first market forecast on big data, everybody's like, oh, Hadoop, Hadoop, Hadoop. And we're like, well, Hadoop will catalyze a lot of things and companies will rot a lot of things, but Hadoop itself will be a small piece of the market. And we started to see some consolidation in that market. So data and the value that I get out of the data is the important thing. So what are your customers focused on? How do they get from their, you know, traditional data warehouses to more modern? What are the challenges that they're dealing with and where are you engaging with them? Sure. So, I mean, one of the challenges that they do have is this explosion of kind of options, right? You know, am I doing things in Hadoop? What is Hadoop at this point, right? Which projects actually constitute Hadoop? So what repository am I gonna use, right? Am I gonna use Hive? Am I gonna use something? Am I gonna use some, you know, MongoDB, Elastic? You know, what's the repository I'm targeting? Generally what we see is that each of those has, and a long list of additional repositories has a role to play for the specific use case. And then how am I going to, you know, get the data there and integrate it and then get the data out and deliver insights. And that stack of technologies and tools is pretty intimidating. And so we see customers starting to color us around some market leaders in that space. The merger of Hortonworks and Cloudera, I think it was a very good thing for the industry. It just simplifies the life of the customer in terms of making decisions and confidence in that stack. It certainly simplifies our life as a partner of those firms. And I think it will help, you know, accelerate maturity in that tech stack. And so I think we're starting to see pockets of maturation, which I think will accelerate customers' investments in leveraging these next generation technologies. That then creates a big opportunity for us because now it's becoming real. Now I really have to get, on a real time basis, my data out of my mainframe or my IBMI system into these next generation repositories. And it turns out that's technically a challenge. And so what we're seeing in our business is real acceleration of our big data solutions against what I would say, you know, production targeted workloads and projects, which is great. All right, M&A, you know, always really active in this space. You know, we've done things sort for many years. So we've watched some of the changes along the way. I believe you've got some news to share regarding M&A activity, and there's also some recent stuff that happened last year. Maybe bring us up to speed. Sure, so we've made two announcements, we made an announcement in the last few weeks, and then one very recently that I'd like to share. The first is about two months ago, we struck up a development relationship with IBM around their B2B collaboration portfolio. And this product set really gives us exposure to integration styles between businesses. Historically, we've been focused on integration within a business, and so we really like the exposure to that. More importantly, it intersects with one of these next-generational data themes around blockchain. And we believe there's a huge opportunity to help be a leader in how do you take blockchain infrastructure and integrate it to these existing systems. So we're really excited to partner with IBM on that front, and IBM obviously is making huge investments there. Before we get, can you, what sync sorts play there when it comes to blockchain? We have definitely talked to IBM quite a bit about blockchain hyper ledger, everything going into there, so maybe give a little more color there. Sure, so look, we still think that production workloads on blockchain are a few years out, and we see a lot of kind of pilot activity. So I think people are still trying to understand the specific use cases that are going to deliver real value. But one thing is for certain, that as customers start to stand up production workloads on the blockchain, they're going to need to integrate what's happening in that new infrastructure with these traditional systems that are still managing the large majority of their transactions. And how do I add data to the blockchain? How do I verify data on the blockchain? How do I improve the quality of data on the blockchain? How do I pull data off of the blockchain? We think there's a really important role for us to play around understanding the specifics of those use cases, how they intersect with some of these legacy systems, and how we provide tailored solutions that are best in class. And it's one of the reasons, it's one of the primary reasons we've struck up the relationship with IBM, but also joined Hyperledger. So hopefully that gives you a little bit more context. That's great. The more recent announcement I want to make is that we've acquired a company called Evu. And Evu is a terrific leader in the machine data integration space. They've have a number of solutions that are complementary to what we've done with our IronStream product. And what we're trying to do there is support as many use cases as possible for people to maximize the value of that they can get out of machine data, particularly as it relates to older systems like Mainframe and IBMI. And what this acquisition does is it allows us to take another step forward in terms of the value proposition that we offer our customers. One specific use case where Evu has been a leader that we're very excited about is integration with ServiceNow. And you can think of ServiceNow as kind of a next generation platform that we to date have not had integration with. This acquisition gives us that integration. It also gives us a set of technology and talent that we can put towards accelerating our overall big data plans. And so we're really excited about having the Evu team join the SyncSort family and what we can deliver for customers. Yeah, great, absolutely. Companies like ServiceNow and Workday, huge amounts of data there, are seeing a lot of it. Dave Vellante's been at the ServiceNow Knowledge Show with theCUBE for a number of years. Really interesting. It seems like this acquisition ties well in with, I believe it was Vision that a year ago. Well, so it ties in mostly with our IronStream product. Now Vision contributed to the IronStream product in that that gave us the expertise to deliver integration for IBMI log data into next generation analytic platforms like Splunk and Elastic. So we had built a product that was focused on delivering mainframe data in real-time to those platforms. Vision gave us both real-time capability and a huge franchise in the IBMI space. Evu builds on that and gives us additional capability in terms of delivering data to new repositories like ServiceNow. Great, maybe step back for a second. Give us kind of some of the speeds and feeds of SyncSort itself. Moment of the company, you've been CEO for a while now. Tell us how we're doing. Yeah, we're doing well. We're having a record year. It's important to actually recognize that in September we celebrated our 50th anniversary. So I think we're a bit unusual in terms of our heritage. Having said that, we've never driven more innovation than we have over the last 12 months. We have tripled the size of the business over the last three years since I've been CEO. We've quadrupled the employee base and we will continue to see, I think, rapid growth given the opportunity we set and we see in this big iron to big data space. Yeah, Josh, you talk about that. You know, when I look at, okay, a 50-year-old company, we talked about data quite a bit differently 50 years ago. What is the digital transformation today? What does that mean for Syncsort? What does that mean for your customers? Help put us in context. Yeah, I mean, it kind of goes back to this original positioning, which is, you know, the largest banks in the world, the largest telecommunications vendors in the world, healthcare, government, you pick the industry. They built a set of systems that they still run today over the last four or five decades. Those systems tend to produce, you know, the most important data of that enterprise. It's not the only data you want to analyze, but it tends to be that reference data that makes everything else, allows you to make sense of everything else. And as you think about how am I going to analyze that data, how am I going to maximize the value of that data, there is a need to integrate the data and move it off of those platforms and into these next generation platforms. And if you look at the way an ESAM file was designed for computing requirements in 1970, it turns out it's really different than the way that you would design a file type, you know, JSON or a file for Impala. And so kind of knitting that together takes a lot of deep expertise on both sets of equation and we uniquely are have that expertise and are solving that. And what we've seen is as new technologies continue to come to market, which we refer to as the next wave, that our enterprise customer base of 7,000 customers needs a partner that can say, how do I take advantage of that new technology trend? In the context of the past 30, 40, 50 years of investment I've made in mission critical systems and how do I support the key integration use cases? And that's what we've determined where we can make a difference in the market is focusing on what are those use cases and how do we deliver different solutions to solve them that help both our customers and these partners. Yeah, absolutely. It's always great to talk about some of the new stuff but you need to meet the customers where they are, get to that data where it is and help move it forward. All right, Josh, I want to give you the final words, kind of broadly open, big challenges, opportunities. What's exciting you as you look forward kind of the next six months? Yeah, so we'll continue to make investments in cloud, in data governance, in supporting real-time data streaming and insecurity, those are the areas that will be focused on driving innovation and delivering additional capability to our customers. Some of that will come through taking technologies like EVU or like the B2B products and enhancing them for specific use cases where they intersect those themes. It will also be additional investments from an acquisition perspective in those domains and you can count on things where to continue to expand the value proposition that it is delivering to its customers, both through new technology introductions but also through additional integration with these next generation platforms. So we're really excited, I mean, we believe our strategy is working, it's led to record results in our 50th year and we think we've got many years to run with this strategy. Josh Rogers, CEO of SyncSort, congratulations on the progress, new acquisition, deeper partnership with IBM and look forward to tracking the updates. Thanks so much, appreciate the opportunity. All right, and thank you as always for joining us, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.