Precisely Holdings, LLC,

doing business as A trade name, trading name, or business name, is a pseudonym used by companies that do not operate under their registered company name. The term for this type of alternative name is a "fictitious" business name. Registering the fictitious name w ...

Precisely, is a software company specializing in

data integrity Data integrity is the maintenance of, and the assurance of, data accuracy and consistency over its entire life-cycle and is a critical aspect to the design, implementation, and usage of any system that stores, processes, or retrieves data. The ter ...

tools, and also providing big data, high-speed sorting, ETL,

data integration Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (such as when two similar companies ...

, data quality, data enrichment, and location intelligence offerings. The company was originally founded as Whitlow Computer Systems before rebranding as Syncsort Incorporated in 1981, and then to its current form in 2020. Its original, eponymously named product, SyncSort, was the dominant sort program for

IBM mainframe IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the large computer market. Current mainframe computers in IBM's line of business computers are developments of the basic design of th ...

computers during much of the 1970s and 1980s. Precisely is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts. As of 2021, the company serves more than 12,000 customers, the majority of which are large enterprises, and has more than 2,000 employees. Josh Rogers serves as CEO.

History

Whitlow Computer Systems: 1968–1981

In 1968, Duane Whitlow and Stan Rintel started Whitlow Computer Systems to develop software for mainframe computers.Johnson, Luanne
"Oral History of Duane Whitlow"
Computer History Museum, Interviewed by Luanne Johnson, recorded 1998-05-08, retrieved 2014-01-14. The result was a business with a niche product portfolio based on high-speed data sorting. According to Whitlow, the company's original task was to develop an airlines reservations system for

Control Data Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywel ...

. In the course of that work, the founders encountered timing charts for IBM's existing sort utility, and thought they could build a sort that was much faster. Sales improved after then-startup '' Computerworld'' published a front page story about the Syncsort product. That story resulted in openings in Europe, and the company was one of the first to sell an independent software product in Europe. The Syncsort product started to sell well in the United States as well. In the

era, many commercial applications revolved around sequential file processing, where master files, often kept on tape storage, were sorted in various orders before being input to application code. In such

batch job Computerized batch processing is a method of running software programs called jobs in batches automatically. While users are required to submit the jobs, no other interaction by the user is required to process the batch. Batches may automatically ...

environments, the sort utility was frequently invoked, and the utility's performance had a significant impact on overall throughput. Syncsort was drop-in replaceable for the IBM sort utility, without having to change JCL statements or application code, and thus was easy to switch to."SyncSort OS Release 2.5 Technical Specifications". Syncsort Inc., SI-0100-2, 1984. For some customers, Syncsort was their first non-IBM software purchase. The company was located in

Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Englewood Cliffs is a borough in Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, whose population at the 2010 United States census was 5,281. The primary market for Syncsort was for IBM mainframes running OS/VS1 or MVS operating systems. There were also Syncsort products for two other common IBM mainframe operating environments, those being

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

and

VM/CMS VM (often: VM/CMS) is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems, including the Hercules emulator for personal computers. The following versions ...

Syncsort Incorporated: 1981–2020

Whitlow Computer Systems renamed itself to Syncsort, Inc. around 1981. (At some point the product name was stylized as SyncSort, with the second 'S' capitalized, while the company name retained a regular spelling.) By then, Syncsort had a dominant position in the IBM mainframe world. A survey done by IDC during 1983 of IBM customers running OS/VS1 or MVS revealed that 75 percent of them were using SyncSort, as compared to 18 percent who were using the IBM-provided sort utility and 7 percent who were using other sort programs."Seventh Annual Survey of Sort Programs Used in IBM OS, OS/VS, and MVS Environments". International Data Corporation, An IDC Market Research Report, January 1, 1984. Syncsort also offered the Syback product, for backup/restore functionality. Advertising for Syncsort products was done in-house until 1986. In the 1990s, the company expanded into client/server environments with a

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

-based sort utility and a backup product. The company also developed data protection technology for Novell, but eventually transitioned its data protection focus to

NetApp NetApp, Inc. is an American hybrid cloud data services and data management company headquartered in San Jose, California. It has ranked in the Fortune 500 from 2012–2021. Founded in 1992 with an IPO in 1995, NetApp offers cloud data service ...

environments. In 2004, Syncsort introduced DMExpress, which added extract, transform and load (ETL) integration capabilities, metadata management and improved job management. In April 2008,

Insight Venture Partners Insight Partners (previously Insight Venture Partners) is an American venture capital and private equity firm based in New York City. The firm invests in growth-stage technology, software and Internet businesses. History Insight Partners was fo ...

, Bessemer Venture Partners, Georgian Partners, Goldman Sachs, and other investors bought a majority interest in Syncsort. In July 2013, Syncsort announced its data protection business would be spun-off, and later that year it was sold to an investor group led by Bedford Venture Partners and Windcrest Partners. Flavio Santoni, CEO of the newly formed data protection company, told CRN that "I joined Syncsort in 2009, and it was clear the company had two separate businesses: ETL and data protection. Both had different customers and dealt with different purchasing people. They were really two stand-alone businesses." Later that month, Lonne Jaffe became CEO and Syncsort began a series of acquisitions that broadened its scope into the big data sector. In September 2013 Syncsort acquired Circle Computer Group, a mainframe data migration provider. In March 2015, Syncsort acquired William Data Systems, a

network monitoring Network monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, SMS or other alarms) in case of outages or other trouble. Network monitori ...

and security software company. In October 2015, Clearlake Capital Group acquired Syncsort. Syncsort's president Josh Rogers was appointed CEO, with Lonne Jaffe remaining as a senior advisor to Syncsort’s board. In August 2016, Syncsort acquired UK-based Cogito, a mainframe software company. The move underscored Syncsort's focus on linking mainframe database data with big data analytics. In December 2016, the company acquired Trillium, a provider of data quality and master data management tools. In 2017

Centerbridge Partners Centerbridge Partners is a multi-strategy private investment firm focused on leveraged buyouts and distressed securities. The firm manages over $32 billion of assets

acquired Syncsort along with Vision Solutions. Josh Rogers continued as CEO of the merged companies, which continued to operate as Syncsort and use the slogan “Big Iron to Big Data.” The phrase reflected Syncsort's ability to cover mainframe computers as well as cloud-based analytics systems. In 2019 Syncsort acquired the software and data business of

Pitney Bowes Pitney Bowes Inc. is an American technology company most known for its postage meters and other mailing equipment and services, and with expansions into e-commerce, software, and other technologies. The company was founded by Arthur Pitney, who ...

in a $700 million transaction backed by affiliates of Centerbridge Partners and Clearlake Capital Group. The deal roughly doubled the company’s size to 2,000 employees and expanded its service offerings to include data enrichment capabilities, such as location services.

Precisely: 2020–present

In May 2020, Syncsort rebranded itself as Precisely. The new name reflected a pivot towards a broad category of tools centered around data integrity, and the company's service portfolio now included data integration, data quality, data enrichment, location intelligence, and customer engagement. In March 2021, Clearlake Capital Group, in affiliation with

TA Associates TA Associates, founded in 1968, is one of the early modern-era private equity firms in the United States. The firm leads buyouts and minority recapitalizations of profitable growth companies. TA invests across five industry groups: technology, hea ...

, re-acquired Precisely in a deal worth $3.5 billion. Clearlake had sold its majority stake in the company in 2017. The company headquarters soon relocated to Burlington, Massachusetts. Following the deal, Precisely pursued a series of acquisitions that supported or expanded the company's existing service offerings. In 2021, Precisely acquired: Infogix, a provider of data governance and quality tools; Winshuttle, a Seattle-based automation and data-management company; Anchor Point, a wildfire data, modeling, and risk assessment provider; and CEDAR CX, an SaaS-based customer communications management platform. In January 2022, Precisely acquired PlaceIQ, a location intelligence provider.

Products

Groupings

Precisely’s portfolio of software and data products is organized into five categories: Integrate for data integration products, including mainframe and IBM i integration and SAP automation products; Verify for

data quality Data quality refers to the state of qualitative or quantitative pieces of information. There are many definitions of data quality, but data is generally considered high quality if it is "fit for tsintended uses in operations, decision making a ...

data governance Data governance is a term used on both a macro and a micro level. The former is a political concept and forms part of international relations and Internet governance; the latter is a data management concept and forms part of corporate data govern ...

, data observability, and

master data management Master data management (MDM) is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and information technology work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise's official shared ...

products; Locate for location intelligence products, including geo addressing, spatial analytics, and mapping products; Enrich for data enrichment products; and Engage for customer communication products. Precisely's Data Integrity Suite combines the data integrity products into a single

SaaS Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

platform.

Individual

References

External links

* **{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200511070136/https://www.syncsort.com/en/home, date=May 11, 2020, title=Last archived snapshot of the company's official website doing business as Syncsort 1968 establishments in New Jersey Companies based in Bergen County, New Jersey Software companies based in New Jersey Software companies established in 1968 Software companies of the United States