SunGard Availability Services Joins DMTF's Open Cloud Standards

WAYNE, Pa., July 20 /PRNewswire/ -- SunGard Availability Services has joined the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Open Cloud Standards Incubator Leadership Board to help address the need for open management standards and interoperability for cloud computing. As a member of the Open Cloud Standards Incubator Leadership Board, SunGard will contribute its expertise in information availability and recovery issues, and contribute to the development of emerging cloud computing standards.

"As organizations embrace cloud-based models, they will plan, design and build IT services very differently - and need to account for these changes in the way that they architect to meet their uptime, continuity and resiliency objectives," said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. "We're pleased to add SunGard to the leadership of our Open Cloud Standards Incubator and look forward to the contributions they will make in helping DMTF address information availability and recovery in our standards initiative."

While there is a proverbial "alphabet soup" of standards bodies attempting to grapple with virtualization and cloud computing standards, DMTF has exhibited proven results, such as the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard and the Virtualization Management (VMAN) initiative, while also fostering agreement across multiple companies with diverse interests.

Also important to SunGard in joining DMTF was being able to contribute to the OVF standard that provides an open packaging and distribution format for virtual machines, which will help foster an ecosystem of interoperable cloud computing services.

"As an integrator of technologies, SunGard, in the past, has shied away from actively participating in standards development," said Don Norbeck, technology officer for virtualization, cloud computing and product strategy at SunGard Availability Services. "However, the promise of virtualization services, rapid emergence of cloud computing models and respected status of DMTF presents a unique opportunity. SunGard looks forward to participating in the development of cloud computing interoperability standards which will have a profound effect on the way IT infrastructures and services are developed and consumed for years to come."SunGard joins other industry heavyweights participating in the DMTF of Open Cloud Standards Incubator Leadership Board such as AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Rackspace, RedHat, Savvis, Sun Microsystems and VMware. No specific standards currently exist for enabling interoperability between private clouds within enterprises and hosted or public cloud providers. DMTF has formed an Open Cloud Standards Incubator to focus on addressing these issues by developing cloud resource management protocols, packaging formats and security mechanisms to facilitate interoperability.

SunGard cloud computing services help companies utilize SunGard computing and network infrastructure to access capacity-on-demand for production computing needs, protection of computing assets and at time of disaster. Also, SunGard provides consulting services and planning software to help ensure application availability, allowing companies to determine why, when and to which cloud infrastructure to move computing applications and data.

SunGard is a charter member of the VMware vCloud partner ecosystem. SunGard leverages VMware's proven virtualization platform to create faster, centralized and automated information availability services to protect both virtual and traditional IT environments.
About SunGard Availability Services
SunGard Availability Services provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software to more than 10,000 customers in North America and Europe. With five million square feet of datacenter and operations space, SunGard assists IT organizations across virtually all industry and government sectors prepare for and recover from emergencies by helping them minimize their computer downtime and optimize their uptime. Through direct sales and channel partners, we help organizations ensure their people and customers have uninterrupted access to the information systems they need in order to do business. To learn more, visit www.availability.sungard.com or call 1-800-468-7483.

About SunGard

SunGard is one of the world's leading software and IT services companies. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries, including the world's 25 largest financial services companies.SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.

With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 435 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor*, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented six times. For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.

*January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com/

Trademark Information: SunGard and the SunGard logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

Source: SunGard Availability Services