Proven Experts in Availability and Managing Complex IT Environments: Sungard Availability Services

“The three pillars behind getting your business the agility you need to compete cost-effectively in the marketplace.”

Businesses around the globe all have different needs, strategies and plans. But one thing unites them: They all have business-critical data and they all lose money and time when their IT fails.

Building and running production environments that are resilient and available in the present, and positioned for growth in the future is one of the biggest challenges facing any company, especially those adopting hybrid IT and other complex environments.

Rather than focusing on one isolated area of technology, however, the smartest companies take a holistic approach to meeting IT needs by developing business continuity and IT disaster recovery plans, as well as recovery or production cloud environments that are fully integrated, responsive and secure. Only this kind of solution will meet their business challenges.

Sungard Availability Services has been on the front lines, conceiving and integrating these systems quickly, flexibly and cost-effectively for a diverse group of companies. Over half of them are small and medium enterprises, and more than 70 percent of Fortune 100 companies rely on Sungard AS’s services. The financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare and business services industries are heavily represented, and it has significant customers from the transportation, telecommunications, utilities and government verticals.

This is how Sungard AS keeps these companies’ IT safe.

The 3 pillars of safeguarding business-critical systems
Every business wants to reduce disaster recovery times, streamline processes, and gain greater utility as IT workloads increase and technology dependency advances.

Few are able to do so on their own, however. The stakes are high and ensuring these three pillars are in place is paramount to driving business outcomes.

Master your complex IT environment: Businesses increasingly manage multi-infrastructure hybrid IT. Some are thinking about or in the process of moving to the cloud. M&A has hampered others with a different set of systems in need of integration. Many are reconciling legacy systems with new technology. The corporate IT budget is flat, but IT spend is rising as other departments purchase IT solutions. And some companies face all of these challenges. CIOs need to provide IT leadership and governance across the business operationally, technically and economically.

Build resiliency into production and recovery: Organizations need to mitigate risk across all environments and systems, but it’s particularly important across critical IT workloads. You need high-availability solutions to keep your business up and running, with the right resiliency built in, both for production and recovery scenarios.

Adapt and deliver: Agility, flexibility and digital innovation are the way forward, but what are the implications for infrastructure, security and business continuity? CIOs need an agile platform, but they fight to balance this with keeping core systems efficient and secure.

Sungard AS has helped thousands of customers globally achieve uninterrupted access to their mission-critical data and systems. Its more than 3,000 professionals are some of the top minds in IT and business, leveraging Sungard AS’s more than 5 million square feet of hardened, secure operations space, 10 strategically located mobile facilities, and 90 hardened IT facilities connected by a redundant, global dedicated network backbone.

How two organizations safeguarded their business
Sungard AS serves a wide variety of industries, including business services, software, finance, manufacturing, retail, wholesale trade, transportation, communications and utilities, technology, healthcare and the federal government. Two of the company’s clients – Zyme and Mitsui Foods – show the range and impact of Sungard AS’s services.

Zyme: SaaS provider conquers IT complexity to realize its vision
In its partnership with Sungard AS, Zyme has been able to focus on growing its business while providing a market-changing CDM solution and delivering continually rising levels of performance. Together, the two companies have built a value proposition based on agility, credibility and security. That’s enabled Zyme to remain the leader in its field, and paved the way for a bright future in cloud-centered channel data management.

“Despite its challenges, the benefits have been huge: our environment is more agile, robust, flexible, and high performing than ever before. We can build, launch, and maintain new applications faster than ever; engaging with our customers in new and innovative ways. To put the impact into context: Zyme’s processing time has been cut by over 80 per cent, even though we have tripled the amount of data running through the platform,” said Ashish Shete, Vice President of Products and Engineering.

Mitsui Foods: Managed Oracle Services allows Mitsui Foods Inc. to focus on e-commerce business objectives
Mitsui Foods incorporated a multi-site deployment to support its disaster recovery objectives, gaining access to state-of-the-art facilities with Sungard AS’s pre-certified Oracle environment (managed servers, OS, SAN, backup, network, firewall and internet) for its mission-critical Oracle e-Business suite. It now enjoys the benefits of an agile and innovative environment with reduced burdens typically associated with upgrades and maintenance.

Both Zyme and Mitsui Foods have been able to focus more on their business, confident that their IT environments were running more efficiently and were ready to grow with the company. These are just two of the thousands of stories in which Sungard AS turns IT challenges into opportunities.

Meet the Master

Andrew A. Stern, Chief Executive Officer: As the chief executive officer of Sungard Availability Services, Andy’s strategic priorities include accelerating the growth of new innovative products, delivering exceptional service and value to customers, and maintaining a focus on the effectiveness of the overall business. Andy joined Sungard AS after 10 years at USinternetworking, Inc. (acquired by AT&T in 2006), where he served as chief executive officer from 2000 to 2008; chief operating officer from 1999 to 2000; and executive vice president and chief financial officer from 1998 to 1999. He also chaired USinternetworking’s board. Andy holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Chicago.