This is the first issue of a global, customer newsletter from Sungard AS. AVAIL had been produced previously just for our European customers. Broadening the scope reflects our efforts to serve you in a standard way across continents. Other executives in our business will be providing you insights into areas of the business in future issues. I’m first up with the Q&A below.
This year I’ve had conversations with many customers globally. I was able to personally convey how dedicated we are to being your IT partner. For those of you whom I’ve not yet met, know that Sungard AS appreciates your business. On behalf of my colleagues at Sungard AS, I want to extend our wishes for a prosperous New Year. We look forward to working with you in 2016.
Q: How is Sungard AS faring now that it’s an independent company?
Andy: When we split-off from SunGard Data Systems in April 2014, we anticipated greater flexibility to evolve our brand, our culture and our industry relationships to best serve our customers. We started with our own brand identity and then refined what today is a very clear value proposition. Simply put, we will work with you, our customers, to understand your unique business needs. Then we will help to customize the environment that best fits your desired outcomes, leveraging both our production and recovery capabilities. This listen-first, tailored, grounded-in-resilience approach, you’ve told us, addresses needs that many other organizations cannot. Evolving our brand was one of the bigger opportunities when we split from SunGard Data Systems, and we’ve really carried through.
At the same time, we’ve invested in additional cloud instances, power, and workplace recovery seats globally. This year alone we invested in capabilities in Dublin, London, Stockholm, Bangalore and a number of core North American markets. We further have released many new offerings across our recovery and production services portfolio, at times working with other industry leaders. We continue to build strong partnerships with leaders such as Cisco, AT&T and EMC.
Financially, we’ve significantly improved our cash position and already paid down a portion of our debt. All in all, our goal has been not just to turnaround our business but to transform it. We have more to do, but we’re well on our way.
Q: Has your strategic direction changed since the split-off from SunGard Data Systems?
Andy: Our strategy hasn’t really changed, but, as an independent company, we’re able to move much faster to implement it. This year, for example, we sold eight non-core data centers in the U.S., freeing us to offer more of our services portfolio in strategic markets to us.
We’ve also evolved our organizational structure to better align with our strategy. Today we have a global approach to how we develop our offerings and to our operational support model. With this approach, we are realizing greater efficiencies ….more consistently delivering our services around the world…onboarding new customers faster…and leveraging our product development innovations globally. We continue to have deep technical expertise, which we are applying to develop innovative services such as the cloud-based recovery solution for Amazon Web Services we announced in October for the U.S. This “cloud brokerage” service adds recovery to the AWS IAAS cloud that you may be using as part of your IT environment.
Q: What are you doing operationally to improve?
Andy: Our focus on globalizing the business has enabled us to standardize and continuously improve our operations. Right now our team in India is working to standardize our processes and operational support globally. That will better enable us to leverage our skilled professionals globally while delivering a consistent service experience to you. We’re automating more activities, such as improving our customer portal. We have a redesigned, cleaner portal landing page and more self-service options. Now you can do more activities yourself, such as getting enhanced reporting, entering requests, reporting issues, checking ticket status and viewing configurations.
Speaking of automation…we also are automating workflow tasks for planning and executing our Managed Recovery Program. We are particularly excited about the possibilities for our proprietary Recovery Execution System. RES has already demonstrated that, through a high degree of orchestration and automation, we can much more quickly build infrastructure, reduce human errors and become more scalable and efficient in the delivery of recovery services.
Q: Since its founding decades ago, how is Sungard AS changing to be relevant?
Andy: We’ve been perfecting disaster recovery since 1978, when we introduced the world’s first commercial hotsite in Philadelphia. There’s still a market for those customers who want to use a shared infrastructure and off-site storage option for their own employees to use for recovery testing. But, in addition to our traditional services, we have a broad suite of recovery services today, providing a holistic approach to business resiliency. Our continued industry leadership is evidenced in both Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant Disaster Recovery as a Service report and in the DRaaS MarketScape report that IDC published last month. Not to mention the growing number of patents we’ve received (10 since April 2014, most of them related to recovery innovations).
According to DR Benchmark, roughly half of outages are caused by software or network failures; only 14 percent are weather related. Outages happen. It’s not just about preparing to recover but building resilience into our solutions. Today we’re leveraging our deep expertise and experience in DR by integrating recovery into our production solutions. That’s a more cost-effective resilience approach for you.
Increasingly many of our customers see beyond our DR capabilities. It’s why more than half of our business today is in the provision of production services. It’s why our integrated solutions – encompassing Recovery as a Service, Cloud and other managed services – are our fastest growing business. These solutions help us help you solve your most critical IT challenges.