Senior Sales Engineer (remote field position)
Pros
Catalogic (formerly called Syncsort) is the data protection division spun off in 2014 from the 44 yr old Syncsort company, which historically provided mainframe software. The data protection group behaved like a "40-yr-old startup" company, and was very nimble with new product releases, new features, and an overall "can do" attitude. The sales teams -- insides sales, direct sales, channel sales and all the presales engineers like myself -- we all ran fast, worked hard, traveled a fair amount, and generally had lots of fun. Our product for backup/recovery/DR commonly beat out well established market leaders like CommVault and EMC, due to its leading feature set, especially around virtual machine protection. Catalogic has also focused in recent years on "copy data management", approaching the data protection requirements obliquely, and not necessarily addressing market leaders head on anymore.
Cons
Management was told in 2013 to "sink or swim" on its own merit (i.e. "sales revenue"), and once the VCs split the (highly profitable) mainframe business, which retains the Syncsort name, and the data protection business, which was renamed Catalogic Software, in 2014, it has been a struggle. Unfortunately, the DP side of the business up until 2013 had never been cash flow positive, hence a wide downsizing in sales in late 2013, reducing costs. Catalogic Software's backup product, still available, has drifted down the Gartner's Magic Quadrant, even lower into the lower left in 2014, and now absent entirely in 2015. Effectively no longer competing for "backup business", Catalogic is trying establish itself as the market innovator/leader for copy data management and data discovery/cataloging for NetApp (and soon other) storage arrays.
