With “The Cloud” exploding and companies jumping in two feet forward there are a lot of vendors trying to get a piece of the pie. While I was at Cloud Connect this past February there were quite a few of these companies present trying to show off their product. One thing I took away from this trip was every one of them, with the exception of one, compared themselves to Amazon (which wasn’t even present at the show).
SunGard provides enterprise class “Cloud” services to the medium to large enterprise space instead of to anyone who wips out a credit card. They have been a pioneer in the DR space starting out almost 30 years ago and in my opinion has been working on what we now call “The Cloud” before the term became hip. They are using VCE’s standard Vblock platform and only allow VMware hyper-visors (a fact that my friend @JohnObeto doesn’t like but understands) but that isn’t the driving factor to their success. No matter what hardware you put in place, it is only good as the people you have supporting it. SunGard gets this and in my opinion is one of the reasons they have been so successful since 1983.
One thing is for sure, all of these entries into what we used to call managed service providers have changed the way we do business today. As Amazon has jumped out as the clear leader in this space, I believe SunGard will continue to be the enterprise Cloud choice for mission critical solutions.
Disclaimer: While I was waiting in the SunGard booth for my appointment at Cloud Connect I picked up a scratch card that they gave to anyone stopping by the booth. My friend received a Starbucks gift card but I only won an iPad2. This was not a bribe but rather a bunch of luck and it did not persuade me to write this article. My opinions are my own and my integrity and posts can not be bought, not even with a new iPad3.