Today, we announced some very exciting news recognizing our partners for their commitment to Syncsort’s solutions. The program is a testament to the important role partners play in Syncsort’s go-to-market strategy. Across both our data integration and data protection businesses, we continue to expand our partner ecosystem and forge deep relationships as we navigate the increasingly diverse and competitive industry landscape.

The past year has brought a lot of attention to the industries we serve. The data integration business saw discussions around the opportunities Big Data represents for companies and how Hadoop and the evolution of ETL tools, or ETL 2.0 as we call it, make capitalizing on these opportunities a reality. In the data protection world, snapshot technology came to the forefront and organizations of all sizes faced increased pressure from the C-suite to modernize backup and implement more robust disaster recovery plans. This has certainly been a positive for solutions like NSB, our integrated data protection offering with our partners at NetApp.

Across the board, our partners demonstrated a tremendous commitment to serving customers and using Syncsort technology to create cost-effective solutions that address some of the most complex IT challenges that exist today. Our partners also showed great enthusiasm for the new Syncsort certification and training programs that we rolled out throughout the year. While we appreciate the many contributions made by all of our partners, the award winners really stood out across multiple dimensions. They include:

Data Integration

• Global Systems Integrator Partner of the Year: Cognizant
• ISV Partner of the Year: Clerity Solutions
• Reseller Partner of the Year: Amdocs

 Data Protection

• Channel Partner of the Year: SwishData
• Channel Partner Rookie of the Year: Zumasys
• NSB Technical Innovator Award: Voyant Strategies

We’ve had a tremendous response from all of the award winners and couldn’t be more enthusiastic about working closely with each of them in the year ahead.  We appreciate their hard work and it’s been fantastic for partners to make statements like:

“Our strategic relationship with Syncsort enables us both to offer clients unique solutions that address the most complex data integration challenges at a fraction of the time and cost. We appreciate the recognition as Syncsort’s GSI Partner of the Year, and look forward to building on our work and success together in the marketplace in the year ahead.” – Hal Lavender, Chief Architect and AVP, Cognizant

“Our partnership with Syncsort provides significant benefits to organizations, such as Singapore Exchange, looking for effective ways to reduce IT operating expenses and enhance flexibility through mainframe migration to better prepare for future growth. By collaborating with Syncsort and utilizing their powerful data integration and sorting technology, we can bring greater value to enterprises with large datasets and batch requirements.” – Cameron Jenkins, COO, Clerity

“Syncsort data protection solutions and their partnership have been a key piece of SwishData’s success since our founding in 2006.  As virtualization continues to disrupt various data center strategies, Syncsort products not only provide our customers and partners with an integrated, simple way to protect data, but also enable them to return to production operation time by recovering applications in minutes instead of the hours commonly required with other products. Fundamentally, SwishData adds value to our customers and Syncsort solutions enhance our ability to do just that.” - Bob Kerr, Vice President, SwishData Corporation

Congratulations again to this year’s winners!

Congratulations to the Syncsort Partner of the Year Award Winners is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

For those of you that regularly visit the Syncsort Blog, you no doubt are familiar with our data protection blogger extraordinaire Peter Eicher as well as our smart, insightful team of data integration bloggers including Steven Totman, Jorge A. Lopez and Keith Kohl. To kick off 2012 right, we’ve even added Dave Nahmias to the mix (welcome, Dave!). Syncsort bloggers always value feedback from their readers. Please don’t be shy about commenting on posts, letting us know what information is valuable and what is not, and challenging us when you have a different perspective.

One aspect of the blog that we plan to devote more time to in 2012 is the “Corner Office” section. This is intended to be a place where insights from Syncsort’s executive leadership team are shared with readers. At times, this will take the form of posts directly from the executives. Other times, I will be sharing links to things like media articles or significant news announcements where our executives are quoted (all part of my day job here at Syncsort!).

In the spirit of getting 2012 started on the right foot, I wanted to share a couple of media articles that you might have missed in December. Both feature extensive commentary from Syncsort’s Vice President of Worldwide Sales Josh Rogers on the topic that everyone seems to be speaking and writing about at the moment…Big Data.

Josh’s interview with Forbes’ Tom Groenfeldt includes some historical information about Syncsort and focuses on how the company today helps many of the world’s largest financial services firms process large volumes of data. Josh also had the opportunity recently to speak with BeyeNETWORK’s Ron Powell. The result is an interesting Q&A that explores why enterprises of all sizes are struggling to scale their data integration environments cost effectively to tap into the insights within Big Data.

We wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2012, and are looking forward to interacting with many of you in the blogosphere!

Syncsort’s VP of Worldwide Sales Josh Rogers Talks Big Data is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

Managing unprecedented data growth while keeping up with performance requirements constitutes one of the major challenges organizations face in the era of ‘Big Data.’ On their quest to leverage information to properly support business objectives, IT departments have historically turned to inefficient workarounds that create significant complexity and escalating costs. In fact, according to a recent research report by the analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group, data integration complexity was the number one data analytics challenge, cited by over 270 respondent organizations.

That’s why increasingly more organizations are embarking on new initiatives to address a fundamental problem: accelerating performance while reducing the cost and complexity of their data integration environments. ETL 2.0, a new approach Syncsort recently started advocating, is our answer to this challenge.  Today, we are pleased to announce DMExpress 7.0, the foundation that we believe will start to make ETL 2.0 a reality for thousands of organizations.

DMExpress 7.0 incorporates key enhancements that further extend our leadership as the only ETL vendor that can provide a fast, efficient, simple, cost-effective approach to data integration. More importantly, the 7.0 release allows organizations to leverage more data than ever before while maintaining the flexibility, ease-of-use, and cost efficiencies required by the business.  The release includes significant enhancements in three key areas:

Scalable, self-tuning ETL Engine. This is the core of our software and a clear differentiator for Syncsort. Having a scalable, self-tuning ETL engine enables organizations to process data transformations in memory within the ETL engine, eliminating the need for staging and freeing up database capacity.  DMExpress 7.0 includes significant performance enhancements and I/O optimizations that deliver even faster performance at scale.

Enterprise Connectivity & Acceleration. DMExpress provides the ability to leverage virtually all sources of data as well as accelerate previous investments in data integration environments. DMExpress 7.0 extends Syncsort’s leadership on this area by delivering:

• Tighter integration with Hadoop, including Load/Extract capabilities
• Faster, easier data integration acceleration through bulk metadata import capabilities
• Improved support for mainframe application modernization projects with expanded JCL SORT  control statement support, and out-of-the-box integration with leading re-hosting solutions

Simple, Agile ETL Development. We believe it should not take you days to install and configure data integration tools. In a matter of days, you should be able to install, develop and deploy your designs into production. That’s why DMExpress 7.0 extends the software’s ease of use, providing features to encourage reusability and collaboration to increase overall productivity.

A couple of months ago at TDWI World in San Diego, Syncsort defined a new approach to ETL, one that would deliver on the long overdue promises of data integration tools. We called this approach ETL 2.0.  Today from TDWI World in Orlando, we announce DMExpress 7.0, the first solution in the market to effectively deliver a completely new approach to data integration, the foundation of ETL 2.0.

DMExpress 7.0 will be generally available in December. In the meantime, stay tuned for more details on our upcoming DMExpress 7.0 release, straight from our R&D labs!

Introducing DMExpress 7.0: The Inception of a New Approach to ETL is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

As usual, VMworld started with a bang. The first night at the welcome reception is always the craziest. Nearly all the attendees wander the show floor simultaneously and there is a great buzz in the air (having a rock band playing not too far away only added to the noise and excitement!).  

The first three hours of VMworld 2011 were packed with non-stop action in the Syncsort booth.  We talked to literally hundreds of customers and propsects in that brief period of time, and ran at least five or six showings of our ‘Race to Recovery’ challenge (tell you the truth, it was so busy I can’t even remember the exact number of times we ran the Race – and I’m one of the presenters!).

Tuesday at the show, news takes the spotlight as Syncsort announces the upcoming release of Syncsort Data Protection 4.0, a key component of the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution that we are demonstrating at booth #527. Here is a quick rundown of what’s new in the release:

• Agentless VMware backup support. This provides management and ease-of-use benefits to users by letting them more easily protect virtual machines. (While Agentless backup has its place, we still think agents are important for some use cases – more on that in an upcoming blog post!)
• Rapid VM recovery from Agentless backups. We are bringing our patented Instant Virtualization technology to the Agentless space, allowing you to restore entire VMs in less than two minutes.
• Remote backup enhancements to better enable cloud deployments, for both private and public clouds.
• Enhancements to storage efficiency (squeezing out even more disk savings) and backup management (major reductions in backup job overhead).
• A new, improved user experience in terms of both user interface and documentation.

Version 4.0 is scheduled to ship within 90 days from today. Once we get past VMworld and all the non-stop activity, I’ll be blogging more about the details of these new features. We are also announcing today that EVO Merchant Services, the largest privately-held credit card processor, is using NSB to reduce backup and recovery complexity. EVO uses NSB to protect its mixed environment of 250+ physical and virtual servers.

Meanwhile, you can stop by our booth and see for yourself, and maybe even run a recovery as part of the ‘Race to Recovery.’  Last night, our iPad 2 winner was Sean Bettencourt, who recovered a VM in a blazing 1 minute and 12 seconds! Not bad for never having even touched the product before.

Yes, it’s really that simple to use, and that fast.  We’re giving away another iPad 2 today, so check the demo schedule at the booth and see if you can’t be today’s ‘Race to Recovery’ winner.

Syncsort Announces Data Protection 4.0 is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

At Syncsort, we understand that exploding data volumes and shrinking IT budgets are forcing organizations to get more out of their data – and even more from their data integration and data protection investments.  That is why we are focused on helping many of the world’s largest organizations to rethink the economics of their data to take advantage of unprecedented opportunities to unlock revenue and competitive advantage for their companies. 

There are many exciting developments in the data integration and data protection markets, and we look forward to using this platform to host conversations with customers, partners, industry experts and the larger data integration and data protection ecosystems. We’ll be sharing our perspectives on industry trends, the latest developments with our extreme data performance solutions, and much, much more.

I’m pleased to welcome you again to the official Syncsort blog! We look forward to hearing from you and encourage your thoughts and feedback.

Welcome to the Syncsort Blog! is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.