In 1968, Duane Whitlow and Stan Rintel started a company to develop software for mainframe computers. The result was a business with a niche product portfolio originally based on high-speed data sorting, but which later moved into Big Data, Hadoop, Cloud, and ETL. According to co-founder Duane Whitlow, the company's original task was to develop an airlines reservations system for Control Data. 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. In the early years, Aso Tavitian managed sales and marketing operations, which soon took off, especially after then-startup Computerworld published a front page story about the product. That story, Whitlow said, resulted in openings in Europe, and the company was one of the first to sell an independent software product in Europe. In those early days, according to Whitlow, Syncsort's product was often the first non-IBM product for many customers. In the 1990s, then known eponymously as Syncsort, the company expanded into Client/Server environments with a Unix-based sort utility and a backup product. In 2004, Syncsort introduced DMExpress, which added core ETL integration capabilities, metadata management and improved job management. In April 2008, Insight Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Georgian Partners, Goldman Sachs and other investors bought a majority interest in Syncsort Incorporated. In 2013 Syncsort recruited Lonne Jaffe as CEO. Jaffe had previously served as Senior Vice President of corporate strategy at CA Technologies, and VP of strategy in the IBM software group. Also in 2013, Syncsort acquired Circle Computer Group, whose product DL/2 facilitates migration of mainframe data, especially from IBM IMS instances to IBM's DB2 under z/OS. In October 2013, Syncsort sold its data protection business to an investor group led by Bedford Venture Partners and Windcrest Partners. The spun off data protection business is now called Catalogic Software. In February 2015, Syncsort acquired William Data Systems, a network monitoring and security software company. In October 2015, Clearlake Capital Group announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire Syncsort. The acquisition was completed in November 2015. In January 2016, Syncsort President, Josh Rogers, was appointed to the CEO position. In July 2017, Centerbridge Partners announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire Syncsort along with Vision Solutions. The two companies were combined into one company. The transaction closed in the third quarter of 2017. Syncsort announced a definitive agreement to acquire the software and data business of Pitney Bowes in August 2019 in a $700m transaction backed by affiliates of Centerbridge Partners, L.P. and Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. The transaction was finalized in December 2019, expanding Syncsort's global presence to 2,000 employees worldwide, and approximately 11,000 customers. In May 2020, Syncsort rebranded itself as Precisely. As Precisely CEO Josh Rogers stated, “Precise and precision are key distinguishing characteristics of the types of software we’ve been delivering to the market and the systems they’ve been supported over the last couple of decades. With regard to high availability and security offerings, you need a high level of precision to support high availability between mission critical transactional applications. That system has to be highly precise in the way it does replication, in the way it handles failover, etc"
