It seems as though the technology industry has been trying to bury Big Iron (a.k.a. the mainframe computer) for the past 30 years. The demise of Big Iron was the premise behind Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1980s, but Sun is basically gone now (absorbed by Oracle) and the mainframe keeps rolling along. In fact, some companies are building a very healthy business out of creating bridge technologies between legacy systems and the next generation of enterprise computing products.

Syncsort Inc. is one of those companies. The firm proudly proclaims on its website that it is “a leader in mainframe technology solutions for more than 40 years,” and it has been one of the early providers of technology to ingest legacy assets into Hadoop clusters.

“That has led us into understanding a bigger market space that we call Big Iron and Big Data. We had this expertise on both sides of the house, and we found that to be unique in the marketplace,” said Josh Rogers (pictured), chief executive officer of Syncsort.

Rogers visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier) during the recent BigData NYC eventn New York City. They discussed Syncsort’s areas of expertise, the company’s recent ownership change and potential areas of acquisition interest. (* Disclosure below.)

Solving tricky problems for customers

Last month, Syncsort released a new product — Ironstream Transaction Tracing — which allows Splunk customers to get a unified view of collated data from different environments. The announcement was a prime example of how the company is working to solve the integration challenge between systems that produce all the data and where users want to analyze the information.

“We’ve got the experts to source that data into these next-generation systems, and that’s a tricky problem for a lot of customers,” Rogers said.

Syncsort’s recent success resulted in an ownership change for the company earlier this year. It was purchased by Centerbridge Partners LP for $1.2 billion in July and then merged with Vision Solutions Inc., a software as a service firm that specializes in real-time data replication and high availability for IBM i (an operating system for the System i platform).

Syncsort is apparently not planning to stay quiet on the merger and acquisition front either. While Rogers would not provide specific details, he did indicate that his team was evaluating potential acquisition options in the areas of metadata management, cloud, real-time data movement, machine learning and security.

“We’re always active on the M&A [mergers and acquisitions] front,” Rogers said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData NYC 2017. (* Disclosure: Syncsort Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Syncsort nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE