Waters Rankings 2015: Best Datacenter Provider ─ SunGard

For Don Wood, chief information officer at SunGard, the key to its datacenter offering is that it's a product that clients won't have to worry about; it will save them money and it allows them to focus on their core competencies.

"Our customers can completely replace their production costs with our services yet count on the same support-and the same relationship-as if nothing had changed," Wood says.

A differentiator for SunGard is that everything an internal datacenter would do is part of its base service. That means software, network and hardware configuration changes and maintenance, patches and version upgrades, disaster recovery planning and testing, security, and compliance and audit support are all included.
The SunGard offering is also flexible and adaptable to customers' changing needs. A physical database administration service is available, which helps firms' application teams with the issue of space management.

"We know that there is a personal component to datacenter outsourcing and our goal is to transform the relationship such that we are seen as an extension of the customer's organization," Wood says.

There have been several upgrades to the offering over the past year, including evaluating and hardening security controls, building automated functions, replacing facility components, and improving green initiatives, such as energy reductions associated with its Energy Star rating.

According to Wood, SunGard's biggest enhancement came with the expansion of its cloud offering to Europe and Asia. Over the next year, Wood says SunGard will continue to look for vulnerabilities it can address. A major focus will also be on migrating traditional disaster recovery solutions to continual availability.

The disaster recovery solution has a less than a 15-minute replication time and uses automated failover in the event of a disaster. Wood hopes to provide continual availability even in the event of a disaster.

"The datacenter's core competency is to ensure our customers can focus on providing industry solutions to meet their clients' business challenges without worrying about the underlying infrastructure," Wood says.