Software Diversified Services

Software Diversified Services (SDS) is a privately held mainframe software vendor headquartered in the Minneapolis, Minnesota area, founded in 1982 by Jim Lampi and now led by President Josh Lampi. The company builds and supports more than 25 products for IBM z/OS mainframe environments spanning security and compliance, multi-platform encryption, network management, performance monitoring, and application modernization.

SDS’s security and compliance line focuses on protecting and monitoring data on systems that still run core banking, insurance, and government workloads — environments where mainframe expertise is scarce and where encryption and access-control gaps carry outsized regulatory and breach risk. The company reports more than 1,000 clients worldwide, including Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations, and has built a four-decade reputation around award-recognized technical support, a meaningful differentiator in a niche where specialized mainframe support staff are increasingly hard to find.

As a self-funded, privately held company with no disclosed venture backing, SDS’s growth trajectory is steady rather than fast-moving, and its technology approach is intentionally conservative rather than cloud- or AI-native. Its relevance is real but narrow: mainframes remain critical infrastructure for large regulated enterprises, keeping dedicated z/OS security and encryption tooling in ongoing demand even as the broader security market’s attention has shifted toward cloud-native architectures.