SunGard Unveils Three New Recovery Centres To Help Meet Increasing Demand For Information Availability Services

London, UK:  6 March 2007: SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability and business continuity services, today announced the construction of three new Workplace Recovery centres in the UK. The new sites will have a combined area of over 153,000 sq ft and will provide 1,700 new Workplace Recovery positions to SunGard customers.

The centres, located in Elland, Yorkshire; Leatherhead, Surrey; and Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, take the total number of SunGard Workplace Recovery positions in the UK beyond 10,000, underlining SunGard’s status as a leader in the UK Information Availability industry.  SunGard estimates that within the defined catchment areas of the three new sites there are 10,600 local businesses that could benefit from Information Availability services to help improve business resilience and recoverability in the event of a ‘disaster’.

In common with SunGard’s wider portfolio of UK recovery locations, each centre will boast several recovery suites, each offering between 10 and 100 Workplace Recovery positions. To assist customers with their  recovery  solutions, regardless of location, all SunGard Workplace Recovery centres offer standardised  high specification telephony, PCs, printers, LAN switching and servers as well as fully cabled meeting rooms, conference facilities, kitchen and rest areas. SunGard believes that its uniform approach at each of its Workplace Recovery centres is a key ingredient for its customers’ ability to recover to an alternate site.  Coupled with SunGard’s common management procedures, customers can have high confidence in their ability to recover.

·         The Elland Recovery Centre provides 89,400 sq ft of Workplace Recovery and data centre space.  Within that space it offers over 360 Workplace Recovery positions, across six suites, and  a conference room, four meeting rooms and two server rooms. The centre features energy-efficient plant that qualifies for the UK Government’s Enhanced Capital Allowances scheme, which supports business investment in low carbon technologies.

·         The Leatherhead Recovery Centre, which is due for completion in Q3 2007, will provide 57,000 sq ft over 1,100 Workplace Recovery positions and will feature 10 suites, Computer Equipment Room, server rooms, showers, post, meeting and rest rooms.

·         The Milton Keynes Recovery Centre is a 7,900 sq ft facility which will, on completion of work, provide nearly 200 Workplace Recovery positions across two suites.

Linking the three new locations is the award winning national Ethernet network[1] – the SunGard National Network (SNN). The SNN interconnects SunGard’s regional recovery facilities, and links them to SunGard's flagship Information Availability data centre, the fully resilient London Technology Centre.  From here, the network extends across ScaleNet, SunGard’s optical network, to SunGard’s London recovery locations, thereby creating a UK-wide virtual recovery campus, comprising over 20 facilities. SunGard believes that its network infrastructure delivers a solution of unrivalled robustness and flexibility for its customers.

In the event of widescale or multiple disaster declarations, when a customer’s first choice recovery location may be rendered unavailable, the SunGard network infrastructure, combined with SunGard’s standardised Workplace Recovery offering at each of its Workplace Recovery centres, can then allow SunGard the ability to offer customers the use of available, alternative SunGard UK Workplace Recovery sites – referred to as ‘rollback’.

Keith Tilley, managing director UK and senior vice president Europe, SunGard Availability Services, said: “We know customers often invoke after fairly mundane incidents, such as power loss or hardware failure. In these instances management need to know that they have a plan designed to help them to resume business without delay.  Indeed, the new British Standard for business continuity management (BS 25999) highlights the increasing importance of putting in place plans to protect businesses from the threat of downtime.

“SunGard’s new Workplace Recovery facilities will help organisations with their business interruption planning. The facilities can quite literally assist them with  ‘picking up where they left off’ – continuing operations using the same IT systems, even keeping the same phone numbers – so the impact on the business may be minimised.  Our new Workplace Recovery facilities demonstrate SunGard’s commitment to helping our customers to be ‘always prepared’, ‘always ready’ and ‘always on’, whatever risks or interruptions they may face.”