On 16 July 2007, SunGard announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire VeriCenter, which specializes in providing managed hosting, colocation and infrastructure services. Under the deal, VeriCenter would become part of SunGard Availability Services. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

With this acquisition, SunGard will gain three very significant assets:

• Approximately 470,000 square feet of data center floor space across seven U.S. data centers
• An application hosting business
• A bigger managed services footprint in six key markets

Collectively, these assets provide SunGard with the means to address a disaster recovery market that is slowly morphing into a continuous IT service availability market. This new service market requires increasingly rapid recovery times, near-real-time data replication and high-speed connectivity to support the replication process.

Driven by these and related requirements, the future of disaster recovery is more about the scalable delivery of failover computing that can rapidly assume primary production operation and cost-effectively improve business resilience. At best, Gartner sees moderate growth as the norm for more traditional cold-site and shared-recovery services. SunGard needs to satisfy this nascent continuous availability market to continue to grow annuity-based revenue.

VeriCenter's contribution to help SunGard achieve this objective is currently unclear. VeriCenter's core competency has been the provisioning of standardized hosting configurations that have no unusual architectural or technology requirements that may be specific to disaster recovery.

SunGard customers:

• Expect SunGard to rationalize and communicate its hosting service offerings within three months of the deal's closing.
• Evaluate new options for shared services, dedicated services and hosting services to support varying and increasingly shortened recovery time objective and recovery point objective targets.

 VeriCenter customers:

• Ensure that post-acquisition hosting service quality and pricing remain consistent. Be prepared to develop shortlist alternatives if this is not the case, or if SunGard elects to discontinue key services.

SunGard and VeriCenter prospects:

• Evaluate forthcoming SunGard service offerings against key disaster recovery competitors such as IBM, HP and Rentsys Recovery Services, and mainstream hosting competitors such as Equinix, Digital Realty Trust and Savvis Communications.

SunGard Data Systems Inc. is a portfolio company of Silver Lake Partners, a private investment firm that also owns a substantial, publicly disclosed interest in Gartner, Inc., and has two seats on Gartner’s 11-member Board of Directors. Gartner research is produced independently by the Company’s analysts, without the influence, review or approval of our investors, shareholders directors. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity” on our website, www.gartner.com.

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