Sungard claims the demand for managed availability services is accelerating at a rate of 30% a year and in a couple of years will outstrip the size of its more traditional recovery services business lines.
“The market has evolved from the position where organisations were interested in providing recovery options if and when the business ever faced some kind of outage,” said Keith Tilley, UK and European managing director of SunGard Availability Services.
“Things have moved on, and corporates now want to protect business information and actually prevent any downtime. Managed services is one way of further reducing that risk and moving to a position of assured business continuity. Auditors, insurers and regulators increasingly want to see evidence of workable business continuity plans,” he said.
Tilley suggested that SunGard now delivers a range of standby services, colocation, managed colocation, and fully managed hosting solutions that meet all of those requirements.
It competes with IBM and HP, and specialists like Pheonix/ICM, but regards internal setups as the continuity option it is most often up against.
In the current economic climate organisations with their own internal set up are more likely to have started to look to outsource their business availability infrastructure, Tilley said. “The harder you look at the cost of internal setups, the more it becomes apparent that some kind of managed service is the way to go.”
The Sungard business has four lines, he explained. “We have business continuity planning software, which is sold under the brand of LDRPS, and there’s a consulting and project management arm, which covers business impact analysis, recovery time reduction programmes, and the like.” It is the traditional recovery standby services that make up most of the $400 million business Sungard has in Europe, though, with managed services contracts on the rise.
Contracts for IT and workplace standby services is the mainstay of the business, but Tilley said the company has as many as 600 managed service agreements in the UK.
He claimed Sungard has been rated among the world’s top five managed services companies by analysts at Tier1 Research, alongside the likes of Rackspace and Saavis.
The vendor’s managed services offer takes in secure hosting, platform and device monitoring, security and network management, to load balancing and off-site vaulting, data replication and mirroring solutions.
Options to supply availability services from the cloud are said to be in the pipeline.
Tilley said the company handles an average of six invocations every month across its 2,000 or so UK customers served out of its base in Bracknell staffed by around 500, with another 100 in other European regions. It has 20 locations dotted all around the country that serve as standby workplace facilities and supply 18,000 available desktops.
The company is BS25999 accredited, as are growing numbers of its customers. Tilley noted how retailers are starting to mandate that business and trading partners have the certification for the British standard for business continuity management before their inclusion into the supply chain. Other businesses will include BS25999 accreditation as a precondition in their tender documents.
