Syncsort Strikes Again, Buys Trader’s For HA

January 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

Syncsort yesterday announced the acquisition of Trader’s, the French firm behind the Quick-EDD line of high availability software for the IBM i server. It’s the second deal for an IBM i software firm in as many months for Syncsort, which nabbed HA giant Vision Solutions last summer.

The deal for Trader’s gives Syncsort and Vision Solutions a third major high availability product to sell, in addition to the iTera Availability and MIMIX Availability products. Perhaps more importantly, Trader’s gives Syncsort a stronger global presence, particularly in Europe but also Asia.

“The addition of Trader’s extends our market-leading position in providing these capabilities for IBM i,” Syncsort CEO Josh Rogers states in a press release. “It also expands our scale and global footprint, especially in EMEA, while advancing our ability to serve large to mid-size customers.”

According to information provided by Trader’s to IT Jungle last summer, Trader’s had 280 employees worldwide across 50 locations, including 42 employees in five European locations. The company, which was founded in 1992, claimed to have 7,000 individual implementations of the software across 1,800 customers, with 90 percent of those running on-premise and the rest in the cloud. Major customers include Allianz, Cartier, ING Bank, Louis Vuitton, and Yamaha.

In 2014, the company brought in €5.8 million in sales revenue and earned more than €1 million in net income, according to the company’s website.

Trader’s broke into the US market about 15 years ago, when IBM gave its blessing for Trader’s to sell its HA software in the world’s largest market, and today Trader’s is represented in the US by BCS Group of Nashville, Tennessee.

By all accounts, the partners have met real success in the US with hundreds of customers and replacement of competitor’s product. (Stateside business has been much more successful than the ill-fated attempt by Trader’s President and owner Thierry Roux to bring imported French cheese onto the COMMON expo floor, which was thwarted by Disneyland security staff a few years back).

What makes Trader’s unique among IBM i HA software providers is its adherence to a proprietary journal-scrape method of obtaining database changes. While the rest of the industry has switched to the remote journaling technology developed by IBM, Trader’s has stuck to its guns with its own technology, which the company claims gives customers better performance than HA products built on remote journaling.

While Quick-EDD/HA was its flagship product, Trader’s offered several products for IBM i shops, including the Quick-CSi auditing solution, the Quick-SmartData data capture solution; the Quick-Anonymizer data scrambling software, the Quick-SPOOL spool file capture software the Quick-PRESS document management solution, and the Quick-ARCHIV spool file archiving software.

Terms of the acquisition, which is final, were not announced. Both Trader’s and Syncsort are privately held.

The Trader’s acquisition shows that Syncsort is not done making deals. Just last month, the company acquired Cilasoft, an IBM i security software company that was also based in France. That deal came on the heels the acquisition of Enforcive, an IBM i security software company with a presence in the United States and Israel.

When Clearlake Capital Group sold Vision Solutions last summer to Centerbridge Partners in order to merge it with Syncsort (which it also held), the idea was to capitalize on the need for better integration between established Big Iron resources and emerging big data systems. Today, the two companies (Vision Solutions was supposed to have been merged and folded into Syncsort from a product and branding perspective, which doesn’t appear to have happened yet) are calling that strategy “Big Iron to Big Data.”

Practically speaking, that strategy has manifested as a desire to chase emerging opportunities for selling high availability and security solutions. The company sees these two disciplines, security and HA, as intrinsically linked – one providing insurance for business processes and another providing insurance for data.

So what direction will Syncsort go next? We’ll tell you as soon as we find out.

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