IPC Partners provides SunGard with customisable disaster recovery solution

(23/11/2009)

IPC Systems Inc has announced a contract with SunGard Availability Services to help provide a suite of customisable disaster recovery (DR) and hosted dealing solutions to SunGard customers in the UK.

IPC has supplied SunGard with a suite of IQ/MAX turrets as part of a major overhaul of SunGard’s Dealing Solutions, which is part of SunGard’s Flexible Workplace Recovery offering. This upgrade will allow SunGard to offer its customers greater flexibility, a higher level of resiliency and more choice when selecting their disaster recovery location.

SunGard has also implemented IPC’s MAXaccess 1000 soft turret and Enhanced Voice Service (EVS) solutions, which help it to push data and telephony access to whichever SunGard or client facility required, in the event that an organisation is unable to operate as normal from its trading floor.

“IPC’s service and technology is renowned within the finance industry and when it came to upgrading our Workplace Recovery trader offering and implementing a new hosted dealing solution, IPC was the obvious choice,” said Keith Tilley, managing director UK and executive vice president Europe, SunGard Availability Services. “In the financial sector, perhaps more than any other, any period of downtime can be hugely damaging, so being able to remain up and running, no matter what, is a must. This deal with IPC will help us to offer our finance customers a more flexible dealing disaster recovery solution across all our Workplace Recovery locations in the UK.”

“If you’re focused on wealth creation, be that in a new division or niche start up operation, the one thing you don’t want to waste your capital on is unwanted headcount and IT costs; especially when you could invest the cash to make better returns for your business and clients. Our customers can now choose an enterprise level dealing solution at a far lower cost than building their own regulatory compliant dealing system. “

Consolidation of infrastructure into two of SunGard’s fully resilient technology centres will be supported by IPC’s thin-building design. This approach concentrates back-office infrastructure, including the Alliance switch at a location remote from the recovery site, providing remote turret capabilities across all of SunGard’s workplace recovery locations in the UK.

“IPC’s implementation of trading systems and network services seamlessly complements SunGard’s recovery solutions, and is a great example of combining the technologies to greater effect,” said Terry Ewin, vice president of sales, EMEA, IPC. “More than just front-office technology, IPC provides a holistic risk management solution through its Enhanced Voice Services (EVS) solution, which configures the network architecture to allow SunGard to customise the recovery facility to its clients’ environment.”

The integrated solutions now available through the partnership to SunGard’s dealing solutions customers are:

Enhanced Voice Services (EVS) – EVS will allow SunGard to customise the recovery facility to its clients’ own environment, routing the direct trading lines already in use. This helps ensure that if the recovery suite is called upon, the existing lines will be there ready for the client as soon as they arrive.

Soft turrets via MAXaccess 1000 – The MAXaccess 1000 soft turret provides the capabilities of a turret but uses a PC and a telephone to allow clients trading access anywhere that an Internet connection exists. It helps enable SunGard to mitigate wide area disruptions by deploying a soft turret to any workplace recovery centre in the UK until the arrival of a physical turret with full functionality.

Hybrid DR System – In a “Hybrid” environment, a SunGard client can use either its own existing backroom or frontroom turret equipment with SunGard’s Alliance MX & IQ/MAX environment. This allows a client to customise their solution and provides an additional level of resilience. A client can use a SunGard technology centres as a backup to one of its own, and can redirect the turrets to connect to a SunGard data centre in the case of an outage.

Hosting offers clients a cost effective solution providing inherent business continuity and information availability. Hosting an IPC system in a SunGard technology centre will provide an instant and cost effective DR solution.

Related topics:  Application and software security   Data management and data security 

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