Less than two years after selling out to Clearlake Capital Group L.P. and ending its 47-year run as an independent company, Syncsort Inc. is being sold again.

Private equity firm Centerbridge Partners L.P. said it will acquire the big data and mainframe software firm along with Vision Solutions Inc., a maker of business resilience software, from Clearlake in a deal valued at $1.26 billion. Clearlake will maintain an unspecified minority position.

The two companies will be merged and led by Syncsort Chief Executive Josh Rogers (pictured). Vision CEO Nicolaas Vlok is expected to stay on as an adviser. The deal is planned to close in the third quarter.

Centerbridge said the combined companies will benefit from a “dramatic increase in global presence, as well as significantly expanded product offerings.” In a press release, Centerbridge Senior Managing Director Jared Hendricks praised Syncsort’s management for doing “an outstanding job of focusing on high-value use cases and strategic partnerships to drive organic growth, while executing an aggressive acquisition strategy.” Those acquisitions include two in the past year: Trillium Software Inc., a maker of data quality tools, and Cogito Ltd., the firm that improves the performance of mainframe databases.

Centerbridge appears to be an unlikely candidate to take on a big technology acquisition. The company invests in a variety of mostly mature industries, including travel, health care utilities and finance. Its recent acquisitions include Great Wolf Resorts Inc., Extended Stay America Inc. and P.F. Chang’s China Bistro Inc. Founded in 2006, the company has estimated total assets of $29 billion, a much larger cash horde than Clearlake’s $4 billion.

Syncsort is one of the few companies to have made the transition from a sole reliance on the IBM mainframe platform to open systems and now big data. Founded in 1968, it made its reputation selling software that performs high-speed sorts on very large data sets, an expensive task in the age of costly mainframe processing cycles. The company claims to have 12,000 customers in more than 85 countries.

As the installed base of mainframes has shrunk in recent years, Syncsort has turned its attention to helping enterprises integrate their mainframe data with new big data tools like Hadoop. The company, whose slogan is “Big Iron to Big Data,” now says it derives less than a third of its revenues from mainframe licenses.

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