SunGard announced a partnership with VMware. This strategic partnership will help organizations leverage VMware's proven virtualization platform with open access to SunGard's vast infrastructure, providing secondary data center facilities.

Ensuring availability and recoverability of applications, systems and technology in the face of disruptions is a requirement for today's organizations. While 24-48-hour recovery windows were commonplace five years ago, many business leaders now require IT to recover systems in less than eight hours, with even more aggressive recovery time objectives (RTOs) coming soon. However, the complexity of recovery, the cost of protection, and the lack of geographically diverse facilities often prevent organizations from delivering solutions that meet these aggressive availability requirements and RTOs.

SunGard provides disaster recovery process expertise and automation combined with an enterprise-class IT infrastructure -- a protocol-independent network, hardened facilities and redundant power systems. In addition, the company's 100% recovery success rate managing declarations in its 30-year history leads the industry. The partnership between the two companies will help organizations to overcome the cost, complexity, and infrastructure barriers that make comprehensive protection of their computing infrastructure prohibitively difficult to achieve. SunGard will leverage VMware virtualization to help create a suite of simple, fully-managed AdvancedRecovery(SM) services, including managed virtual recovery services, expected to be available later this year.

"Using VMware virtualization with SunGard can help organizations effectively minimize unplanned downtime, deliver higher levels of availability and be better prepared in the event of a disaster," said Carl Eschenbach, executive vice president, worldwide field operations, VMware. "Together, we are delivering customers a powerful joint solution that helps enable a disaster-resilient IT infrastructure, with the simplicity of a managed service offering."

"VMware's virtualization platform is transforming disaster recovery by helping companies to protect a wide range of applications and data," said Frank Casey, vice president of product strategy, SunGard Availability Services. "We are working with VMware to create a faster, centralized and automated information availability service to help organizations of all sizes that need to protect both virtual and traditional IT environments. It is the next stage of SunGard's commitment to delivering AdvancedRecovery solutions to companies with varying IT infrastructure needs, and we are tapping the best minds and technologies in the industry to make this happen."