Company Puts Computer Networks in Sync : The firm, based in Irvine, provides products that make corporate systems run fast and efficiently.

As a former student of UC Berkeley in the 1960s, you might not expect John Rademaker to wear ties and white shirts and run a company that makes products for Fortune 500 customers of strait-laced IBM.

But Rademaker, 46, worked his way through school as a computer programmer. That led to consulting assignments to help build computer networks, something he figured would be a more lucrative career than his degree in sociology offered.

And so it has been. Rademaker’s company, Sync Research Inc., expects to hit $9 million in sales by the year’s end, and Rademaker projects 1994 sales will hit $21 million.

Sync Research started in 1982 as a computer communications consulting company. It grew to 75 employees as a provider of products that make corporate computer networks run fast and efficiently.

Those products function like traffic managers for crowded freeways loaded with packets of data. These data freeways have different computer languages, or protocols that encode the data so it can flow freely on networks.

Sync Research specializes in making software and equipment for the IBM type of network for centralized mainframe computers, known as Systems Network Architecture (SNA), an estimated $170-million market, according to the Yankee Group, a market research firm in Boston. Rademaker says the market is bigger.

“Everyone has heard about how IBM is crumbling like Eastern Europe, and a lot of people are streaming in the other direction from us,” Rademaker said. “But the reality is they still have a $65-billion business.

“What we do is perform a value-added service for IBM networks. This is one of those things that will be absolutely wrong or fiendishly clever.”

Sync Research’s window of opportunity opened with the rise of inexpensive networks of personal computers as alternatives to IBM’s big-ticket, centralized computers during the 1980s.

As competitors eroded IBM’s market, the corporate giant no longer commanded as much loyalty from network managers that they refused to buy from anyone else.

To use new software designed for competing PC networks, customers were willing to mix products from a variety of vendors. Customers also needed products to convert data so that it could flow on either kind of network, and vendors such as Sync Research and competitors Sysco Corp. in Houston and NetLink Inc. in Raleigh, N.C., gladly provided them.

“These two kinds of network architectures, PCs and mainframes, were separate by technical barriers, and now the process of linking them is leading to hot opportunities for these companies,” said Todd Dagres, a Yankee Group analyst.

Sync Research also caught the wave of cost-cutting among companies that needed to expand their networks at prices cheaper than IBM offered. Its sales grew swiftly from $5.5 million in 1991 to $9 million in 1993.

Sync Research received more than $11 million in two rounds of venture capital backing, and Rademaker said the company could possibly go public after hitting its $21-million sales target next year.

Sync’s customers include telephone giants such as AT&T;, which uses Sync products to ship customer information to operators instantaneously; and banks, which use the products for their automated teller machine transactions.

“This clientele is very conservative, from the Rush Limbaugh school of business,” said Fred McClimans, analyst at the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn. “They won’t buy anything unreliable. Sync has good name recognition and that really matters here.”

Typical prices for Sync systems range from $2,000 to $40,000, and large installations reap about $400,000 for the company. AT&T; has bought more than $10 million in equipment and service since it became Sync’s first big customer in 1989.

Rademaker is betting that companies will spend billions of dollars upgrading their computer networks in the next decade. The growth will come as today’s 50,000 IBM networks evolve toward a goal of total compatibility with the rag-tag PC networks that exist across the globe.

The privately held company, which does not disclose exact details on its financial performance, is losing money now because it is using the $7.8 million to invest in a new generation of products, he said.

As technology dissolves compatibility barriers and as customers demand ever more instantaneous connections, Rademaker expects to see a huge clash among the vendors.

“We want to be positioned for that,” he said, “but my ambition is to do well by my customers, shareholders and employees, and to leave a quality footprint in the sand.”