Clearlake Capital Acquires Woodcliff Lake-based Syncsort; Company to Stay in NJ
New Jersey enterprise software company Syncsort has been sold to equity group Clearlake Capital Group (Santa Monica, Calif.) for an undisclosed amount.
The company was founded in 1968 as a mainframe-sorting specialist, but lately has been incorporating big data products and integration into its mix.
The company, which employs about 140 people in Woodcliff Lake, is expected to stay in New Jersey, with CEO Lonne Jaffe at its helm.
A company spokesman said, “We were acquired by a new private equity investor from the private equity consortium that has owned us since 2008. The new private equity investor, Clearlake Capital, is investing in our management team and Syncsort with a goal of accelerating growth — it’s a long-term investment play. It’s essentially business as usual and does not necessitate an office move.”
Syncsort’s previous investors included Insight Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Georgian Partners, among others.
Syncsort provides enterprise-grade software that spans “Big Iron to Big Data,” including newer analytical platforms such as Apache Hadoop, Splunk, Apache Spark, and the cloud, as well as more mature platforms such as the IBM z Systems mainframe.
The company recently forged several technology alliances with industry leaders such as Splunk, Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, Dell, Fujitsu and Tableau.
In a report on the acquisition, Matt Aslett, research director for 451 Research (London, U.K.), wrote, “We don’t anticipate that this deal will have a significant impact on the wider data-integration market, or even on Syncsort’s strategic direction, but it is likely to give the company greater funding with which to accelerate its expansion into addressing the integration requirements of emerging data platforms alongside its existing and ongoing commitment to the mainframe.”
He continued, “Syncsort has approximately 225 employees and more than 2,200 customers and is differentiated by its focus on both the mainframe and big-data platforms, which we are confident was attractive to Clearlake.”
In a release, Jaffe said “We are really looking forward to partnering with Clearlake to continue to grow the company, both organically and through acquisition… It is very exciting for us that Clearlake shares our vision for accelerating growth and is investing in our successful technical strategy.”
