Contact: Ben Kolada
SunGard recently disclosed that it is taking a second look at divesting its Availability Services (AS) division. The company first attempted to shed the AS segment in 2004, but the move was canceled when SunGard was acquired by a consortium of private equity firms. The unit contributes slightly more than one-quarter of SunGard’s total revenue, and, like the rest of SunGard’s business lines, has seen a decline in sales. However, the AS division has proven more resilient than the remainder of SunGard’s businesses; the revenue of those three units combined has dropped nearly 8% in the first nine months of this year, compared to the same period last year.
Meanwhile, sales at the company’s AS division fell only about 3%, due in part to declining demand for disaster recovery (DR) services. If cut free, we expect that the independent SunGard AS could focus on and invest in its managed hosting, cloud and colocation businesses, which, over time, would more than offset losses from its traditional DR services. In particular, the division’s managed hosting services have considerable room to grow, as we project that global revenue for that segment will increase 20.8% in 2011.
SunGard AS is already investing in cloud and managed hosting services, as well as refining its geographic focus. We recently wrote about the division extending the capability of its cloud computing platform to provide an enterprise cloud service, and noted the appointment of Andrew Stern, former CEO of managed hosting provider USi, to its chief executive seat. As part of its geographic realignment, the company sold its South African operations two years ago and acquired Irish managed hosting provider Hosting 365 this past March.