SunGard Availability Services and University of Texas at Austin Partner to Create Cloud Computing Research Center

WAYNE, Pa., Nov. 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- SunGard Availability Services today announced a partnership with the University of Texas at Austin to create a Cloud Computing Research Center.  Through the partnership, SunGard and UT Austin will jointly identify relevant and unsolved research problems in the cloud-computing field, pursue targeted research initiatives to solve those problems and commercialize as appropriate the resulting research.

Initially, the center will address some of the core problems faced in the industry. It is anticipated that the results of the research will have an impact in such areas as mobile computing, networking, verification and fraud protection, encryption, and large-scale distributed processing. The Center will also develop new approaches to protect data as it traverses the cloud and the Internet, and explore emerging technologies that may benefit the efficiency of massive-scale infrastructure.

SunGard will contribute its expertise—as a leading service provider of cloud computing, managed hosting, and application recovery to the Center—which is located on the University's Austin campus.  In turn, the University of Texas will leverage its exceptional applied research capability so that the knowledge generated can either be commercialized or subsequently contributed back to the technology community.

"The University of Texas attracts world-renown faculty and students experienced in distributed and high-performance computing, making the school an ideal partner for this initiative," said Indu Kodukula, executive vice president and chief technology officer at SunGard Availability Services.  "SunGard looks forward to engaging with UT educators and the next generation of researchers to solve the difficult IT problems we face in an accelerating market. We also expect the discoveries made will help shape the future of cloud computing."

Click here to see Indu Kodukula talk about the SunGard Availability Services' Cloud Story

"Partnering with an industry and cloud computing leader like SunGard Availability Services allows us to conduct research that can truly further the state of the art," said Bruce Porter, Chair and professor of Computer Science at UT Austin. "Many of the principles of distributed computing are eminently applicable to cloud computing and we appreciate that SunGard chose to partner with us in this endeavor; this decision affirms our deep roots and leadership in the areas of systems and distributed computing."

SunGard and UT Austin have created an executive committee composed of two UT Austin faculty (Professor Bruce Porter and Professor Keshav Pingali) and two SunGard executives (Kodukula and Chandler Vaughn, vice president, product development) to guide the overall research program at the Cloud Computing Research Center. One of the first projects under consideration is the development of an Exabyte-scale storage cloud building on the Depot research led by Professors Mike Walfish, Mike Dahlin and Lorenzo Alvisi.

About SunGard Availability Services  

SunGard Availability Services provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software to over 9,000 customers globally.  With approximately five million square feet of datacenter and operations space, SunGard Availability Services helps customers improve the resilience of their mission critical systems by designing, implementing and managing cost-effective solutions using people, process and technology to address enterprise IT availability needs. 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.sungardas.com or call 1-800-468-7483.  Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

About SunGard

SunGard is one of the world's leading software and technology services companies. SunGard has more than 20,000 employees and serves over 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, 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 of about $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 434 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and IT services company. Look for us wherever the mission is critical. For more information, visit www.sungard.com.

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