Sungard AS enhances the service it first rolled out last year, with an emphasis on increasing scalability to better meet the needs of larger customers.
Joseph George, Vice President of Product Management, Global Recovery Services, Sungard AS
Sungard Availability Services [Sungard AS] has enhanced the Cloud Recovery – Virtual Servers service they launched in November 2017. This service marked the first partnership between this division of Sungard AS, and resiliency specialist Zerto. The major enhancement sees scalability increased to support over 1000 virtual machine environments. The SLA support has also been improved, and the ability of customers to bring their own Zerto licenses has been added.
Sungard AS was spun out of Sungard in 2014, and since the acquisition of Sungard and the disappearance of its brand in 2015, they are now the only Sungard-branded company in the IT space. They provide a broad range of disaster recovery-as-a-service [DRaaS] offerings, as well as business continuity, information security and cloud systems services, to a diverse customer base. Over half of their customers are SMBs. At the other end of the market, more than 70 of the Fortune 100 use them.
Their go-to-market model is also diverse.
“We have a fairly large direct sales force, and also have a lot of channel partners,” said Joseph George, Vice President of Product Management, Global Recovery Services, Sungard AS. “The partner base is very diverse, and includes both big-hitters and a lot of smaller ones.”
Before Sungard AS launched the Cloud Recovery – Virtual Servers Service, they had nothing precisely in this space.
“We had a variety of different solutions, but we didn’t have a strong one aimed specifically at those hypervisor-based environments,” George said. “We had specific server-based and storage-based solutions for virtualized environments, but we saw that the market was moving to more storage platform-agnostic level recovery. This type of offering was becoming more essential to satisfy the needs of complex customers.”
Sungard AS had worked with Zerto previously on the hosted cloud side of their business, but not around DRaaS.
“That relationship was definitely a factor in us working with them,” George stated. “Their technology let us deliver very aggressive Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives. We bring not in just the recovery piece, but fully managing the recovery lifecycle as part of full lifecycle and change management. That’s a key part of our value proposition.”
George said that the original solution has drawn good interest from customers.
“With any new product, it takes time to translate it to revenue, and at this stage we have a strong pipeline and a lot of promise rather than a huge number of deals closed,” he said. “We had to make sure the sales teams were enabled, build up the competency and enablement mechanisms, and get the kinks ironed out,” George noted. “That’s not unusual with any services we announce. We are now past that point, however. We are working with Zerto at the field level, and we are really looking forward to the second half of the year.”
“Zerto wants to play a very strong and positive supporting role here, and it’s our responsibility to do that,” said Matt Kates, Strategic Cloud Account Manager at Zerto, who is the lead for the Sungard AS relationship. “We have a team of people looking at all aspects of the partnership, and work with them to make sure their operations and support teams have the education and capabilities to deliver a high level of service on the platform. Sungard AS is highly educated on our product, but because it’s a new service, we are here to full in any gaps.”
“The initial release involved the primary use cases,” George said. “The new updates add additional Zerto capabilities, and there has been a lot of ramp-up.
“We now provide larger scale support for over 1000 virtual machine environments, which lets us better support the needs of larger customers,” he stated. “It’s this larger scale support that is the key part of the enhancements. Similarly, we have also expanded the 4-hour RTO SLA. It was for 100 VMs before and now its for 250 VMs.” Customers are now able to use their own Zerto licenses as well.
The next release of Cloud Recovery – Virtual Servers Service will expand the hypervisor support.
“The Initial support was VMware, but we will be adding Hyper-V in the next release,” George said.
